Tried to install XP on a win 7 system, now can't see win 7 :o

[Scania]

Tried to help a mate install XP on a spare ide drive in his win7 system (win 7 is on a seperate SSD)

Got the XP up and running only to find his motherboard does not support XP I.e. no drivers so decided to not continue further.

Subsequently, on reboot, his system won't find the Win7 SSD even if we unplug his other drives.

Telling the machine to boot from the Win7 DVD to try and run a recovery does not work either, the machine won't see the Win7 DVD (it sees the XP disc we used)
I presume we've buggered up the boot setup on the SSD but are now stuck to repair it or try a clean win7 install as it won't see the Win7 DVD.

Help!!!

Thanks.

 

[djshauny1]

Select the SSD as the main boot option in the bios?

 

[Scania]

Select the SSD as the main boot option in the bios?

Done that, if only it were that simple - the SSD is the only drive showing yet it won't boot from it.

As I say, it sees the DVD drive with an XP disc in it but not with Win 7 (we've tried numerous win 7 discs to rule out a faulty disc)

 

[MagicBoy]

XP has most likely overwritten the boot information on the SSD, even if it was installed to a different drive. As XP is older than 7 it doesn't understand how to enable dual boot and merrily overwrites stuff. I've been bitten by it in the past, safest thing to do is to temporarily disable or ideally unplug all other drives when installing another OS.

If you can boot off the DVD (change the boot order in the BIOS) then you can likely fix the SSD without a reinstall using the recovery options.

If the mainboard will support USB boot you can make a Windows 7 pendrive.

EDIT : This should help. Should *just* fit on a 4GB one off the top of my head.

 

[Scania]

We're trying to boot the Win7 CD but the machine can't see any of the discs - it sees an XP disc fine, but can't recognise the Win7 discs (we've tried Win7 32 bit and 64bit discs, it can't see either! ???