Question I believe I made a mistake trying to dual boot PC with win XP?

snggpo

Honorable
Nov 5, 2014
20
0
10,510
I've never done this before, and from what my friends told me it was relatively simple to achieve, so I ignorantly dove into it thinking I knew what I was doing and I clearly didn't, and so I'm wondering if I can reverse the damage that I've done and get back to my main OS of win 10 at the least?

So basically in windows disk and partition management tool I shrunk the partition on my main SSD by 15gb to make room for 64bit win xp pro. I then booted into the win xp disc and installed the OS onto that 15gb of "unallocated space" or at least thats what I thought? Initially I recieved an error stating that too many partitions were already on that drive to create another, so I looked at the partitions on my SSD and there was the main partition with the os and all the files then system reserved, a recovery partition, and then lastly a drive E with supposedly nothing on it. So i went ahead and deleted partition E and that was sufficient enough to allow me to install XP on the 15gb of unallocated space. The problem is now my pc always boots into XP and does not give me the option to boot into windows 10. Nor does it even recognize that windows 10 exists in the startup/recovery options in xp, so i cant select which os to boot into. Is there a way for me to at the very least undo what I've done? Or have I permanently corrupted my windows 10 installation? All of my files seem to still be there.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
You did it in wrong order, Win XP was created 15 years before Microsoft even thought to make 10, so it doesn't have any idea what WIn 10 is and happily wrote over your boot details.

See if you can find 10 using this:

On another PC, download the Windows 10 media creation tool and use it to make a win 10 installer on USB - handy rescue disk and it does recognise itself

change boot order so USB is first, hdd second

boot from installer

on screen after languages, choose repair this pc, not install.

choose troubleshoot

choose advanced

choose command prompt

Follow this: https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-rebuild-the-bcd-in-windows-2624508