ATHI10, multi boot system, can't boot or load XP image & need to replace Win7 image,
Can't find this exact situation, sorry if I overlooked it. And I am a newbie. Do I need to use recovery discs with the recover mode and images?
Have ATIH10, and have been religiously creating images of multi boot XP, Vista Win7. Made the partition mode images, not whole disc images, and stored on external hard drives. Now added new internal hard drive (went from Seagate 320 to WD 1TB black caviar). Could not move any images to the new hard drive after partitioning new hard drive as desired. New hard drive was added as drive 1, original was 0; disconnected old and plugged new into #0 sata port, shows as 0 now. Not sure if this matters. Reloaded from scratch Vista & Win 7 (what a pain) but have no XP disk so I must install from the image. Used the recover mode and followed instructions. Still can't boot into XP. But when I go into win7 I can see the XP in the XP partition. Tried the XP recover disc from mfgr and it will not repair the image.
Also, since I bought Office 10 student and used the 2 installs that came with it in Win 7, I need to replace the Win7 (loaded from scratch) with the image that has office 10 (or buy Office 10 again, not an option), or just load Office 10 from the image, if possible. Thus 2 images need loaded to new drive: XP and Win7. I have recover discs made at first images, but made many images since and deleted the old images. Do recovery discs have to be made with each new image? Images stored on external hard drives of various brands over time. Not sure that matters.
Using Easy BCD, I can now boot into Vista and Win7 in new hard drive no problem, but get error screen when I click on XP. Tried loading the XP image in the old internal hard drive after creating a 30+gig partition at end, but refuses to load. Do I need to wipe this clean and load from scratch? Does XP have to be the first OS on a drive?
It is probaly my mistake somewhere but I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong. I want partition order (if possible): Win7, Vista and XP. Plan to load win8 and delete Vista and also load maybe Linux and or Android in the future. Do I need to wipe the new HD clean, reformat, delete all partitions, then load the XP image, then create a partition, then load Visa image, partiton, load Win7, etc? Or is this not an issue? Thought I had both belt and suspenders with multi backups on multi external drives.
I do not understand all the technical terms so please use more newbie descriptions. And not sure what are important issues or not, so just put everything here, just in case.
Thanks in advance! I have no idea what to do next.
