Dual Booting Windows 7 and XP, why cant I see the new partition I have made?

[DJMK4]

Hi,

I have a single 750GB HDD (Seagate) which I have created 4 partitions:

C: Windows7
D: Supposed to be my XP partition
E: Media
F: Important

I have successfully installed windows 7 on C: and boots fine, I went to install XP on the D: partition but for some reason when I book from the XP disk it wont recognise the D partition.

Here is how my disk is layed out in disk management in windows 7:

C: Windows 7 - Dynamic (Healthy (Boot, page file, crash dump)
System Reserved - Dynamic (Healthy system)
D: Windows XP - Healthy
E: Media Drive - Healty
F: Important - Healthy

Not sure whats happened here, I can create/delete volumes but no references to partitions in here.

Trouble is I cant afford to loose the data on E & F atm until I get a new HDD for my server.

Is there anyway I can do this without the risk of loosing data?

All I need to do now is somehow install XP on D:\ but the set-up procedure wont recognise that, even if i delete the volume so its "unallocated space" it wont recognise it.

Thanks for your help amigo's

 

[wam7]

You should always install XP first then Windows 7 after.

 

[scoopex]

You should always install XP first then Windows 7 after.

This.

 

[DJMK4]

OK, Ill give this a go

Thanks

 

[DJMK4]

Dont know what happened there, apparently if you delete one partition it deletes all of them good thing i backed up my most important stuff, i still have some stuff missing though unfortunatly.

Is there no way I can install XP after windows 7? iv had a ***** of a week and cant find any xp installation cd's anywhere so might have to buy another copy, to make things worse, I have no blankeysssssssssssss hellpp

So much for taking a week off work to "get things sorted", turning into a nightmare

 

[Dano]

Testdisk will be able to recover the partitions.