Messed up my boot during dual boot

[Iamsoda]

So I had a great working system till I tried to dual boot windows 8 and windows xp (older software being used). I deleted the windows xp information and now I can't get windows 8 booting. When I tried some of the fixes it says the disk is locked.

Things I did:
changed the boot legacy thing
changed the sata to ide


What can I do besides reinstall windows?

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

Which was installed first XP or 8

Vista 7, 8 & 10 create small boot manager partitions but if XP is found use that XP partition
There was a c:\boot folder in XP

Now gone !

Go back to hard disk controller setting used when win 8 first installed
Boot off the win 8 DVD and see if a startup repair works

If no win 8 DVD available you can use a system repair disk
With another win 8 PC make a system repair cd or USB

http://www.7tutorials.com/how-create-system-repair-disc-cddvd

Best of luck

Mike Barnes

 

[HEXiT]

reset your bios to optomized defaults. reboot the machine
if it works fine. if not
boot with the windows 8 disk. and run a startup repair. follow the onscreen prompts and select the option to repair the boot sequence. (nothing else)
apply it. let it do its job and reboot. you may need to do this more than 1s but if your doing it 4+ then the problem is terminal and likely only a full install will work...
if you do fresh install, make sure you delete all existing boot partitions and create new 1s. (you can leave secondary partitions intact if you wish)

 

[Tom Tancredi]

Hmmm I would RATHER suggest you just clean build a Windows 8 PC, then download a Sandbox like Oracles VirtualBox. https://www.virtualbox.org
Then take Windows XP ISO install it into the sandbox, and it will run XP inside your 8 without the mess your experiencing now.

 

[Iamsoda]

Hmmm I would RATHER suggest you just clean build a Windows 8 PC, then download a Sandbox like Oracles VirtualBox. https://www.virtualbox.org
Then take Windows XP ISO install it into the sandbox, and it will run XP inside your 8 without the mess your experiencing now.

Well I decided to give my windows CD the middle finger and rebuild it. In the future if I want to run full dual boots I will install on a separate hard drive, but disable the other hard drives (I have 2 sata controllers on my motherboard).