Need some help building a multiboot system

Need some help re-building a multiboot system

I had a system with a single drive setup with OS Selector, allowing me to boot into XP w/IE6, XP w/IE7, and Vista Home Premium w/IE8.

All was well and lovely. None of the three were aware of each other.

Then I tried to get Windows 7 RC installed, and things went badly. The first time, Win7 worked until I restarted it, then it disappeared from OS Selector, found it was attached to the Vista install's boot, but still failed.

Decided to get rid of Win7 and the old Vista install, try again. Reinstalled Vista (still, each OS has it's own partition), then Win7. Same problem, but now Vista was booting from the first XP install, then OS Selector stopped working. After activating it failed with Error 03. After reinstalling, it failed with Error 03.

Nothing boots. So, starting from scratch but asking for help this time because I clearly screwed something up.

I need to accomplish either of the following:

1) a multi boot system with two XP installs, Vista, and Win 7. All on their own partition, all completely unaware of each other.
2) Same but without Win 7.

I have a Dell Inspiron 530s and a single hard drive (plenty of space). I mention this to explain why OS Selector doesn't recognize my DVD drive so I can't boot from discs from within OS Selector.

Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

conklin94122,

Have you seen this site?

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/index.htm

 

Brian K,

Yes, I had, thanks.

I understand how to do it, and have done it successfully before.

The problems happened when I tried to introduce Windows 7 into the mix... or when I made a stupid and unrelated mistake at the same time that I'm not aware of.

My original setup was two XPs and one Vista, and it was working perfectly.

 

conklin94122,

I don't use OSS but it sounds like the Win7 partition was not Active when you installed the OS. The boot files go to the Active partition which sounds like it was Vista.

I use BING and this has been mentioned several times in the BING newsgroup when folks fail to make the target partition Active prior to installing the OS.

 

Thanks Brian, I'll give that a shot.