Dual booting with 2 Hard Drives, XP , Win7

[donot]

Here's my situation I recently bought Windows 7 Pro and a new Sata Hard Drive. My intent was to add Windows 7 to the new hard drive and leave my XP installation alone on the other Sata hard drive plus I have another Sata hard drive I use for Storage. At first I tried installing it with the 3 hard drives plugged in but after win 7 copied its files over and restarted I got the "Insert System Disk and Press Enter". So I tried installing it again but it ended up the same way, so I unplugged the other hard drives and installed windows 7 Pro on the new hard drive. So now it loads win 7 on power up and the only way for me to access XP is to change the boot order in bios or pressing F12. I tried installing win 7 again with all 3 sata hard drives plugged in but it still won't give me the dual boot menu. I tried using bcdedit to add XP to Windows 7 boot manager and that did add Windows XP to the boot menu but when I choose XP all it does is restart. When I press F8 when I choose XP I get a menu that lets me disable restart when I get an error and this is the error I got:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root> \system32\ntoskrnl.exe


I check my XP drive and ntoskrnl.exe is in that file path so it can't be missing and seeing as I can boot into XP if I change the Bios order that means it can't be corrupt. Someone mention that I should go into the Recovery Console for XP and do a FIXBOOT and then go into windows 7 and do a FIXBOOT. But when I got into the Recovery Console for XP and did a DIR I got this message:

An error occured during directory enumeration.


I seem to be getting a lot of errors when all I'm trying to do is add XP to windows 7's boot manager. So my question is, is there another way to manually add XP to the windows 7 boot manager?

In case this makes a difference:
In XP, it says XP is Drive C and Win7 is Drive D
In Win7 it says Win7 is Drive C and XP is Drive D
XP PRO SP3 32-bit
Win7 PRO 64-bit

 

[Guest]

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root> \system32\ntoskrnl.exe

Create a new boot.ini file.

 

[Scotteq]

How to Dual Boot Win 7 and XP:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

 

[cappster]

I have three Hard drives as well when I installed window 7. I already had XP on one hard drive and simply installed windows 7 on the other (using the third as storage). That was basically all I did and the boot menu gives me a choice of windows 7 or older version of windows.

You may want to check your XP partition's boot.INI file and make sure it looks the way its supposed to. You can also check this link as it tells you how to repair the missing file:

http://www.ozzu.com/mswindows-forum/ntoskrnl-exe-corrupted-windows-wont-open-t24580.html

As far as drive lettering between the different OS's, that shouldn't matter. The same thing happens on my computer at home.