Inaccessible Windows 7, no working boot manager

[The Kiwi]

On a computer I'd previously dual-booted between XP and Vista, for nearly a decade, I installed Windows XP on a fresh hard drive with several partitions, and as soon as it seemed stable, I started the install of Windows 7 on a partition of its own.  Everything seemed fine, until I installed the Service Pack, and it "froze" the system when the progress bar reached the end. 

It sat there with no obvious activity going on, and I fixed another cup of coffee.  I'm guessing twenty-thirty minutes; finally, it was configuring itself, got to 30%, and rebooted, but the only option from there was back to XP, or "CD". 

There was no BCD based boot menu appearing, only the one from XP's NTLDR.  Running the Repair from the DVD got an initial fix of some sort, and the SP finished configuring, but no Windows 7 boot manager exists.  Your Visual BCD Editor wouldn't install in Windows XP, and the distribution disk no longer finds anything to get Win 7 running. 

Today is my first exposure to Windows PE, although I wouldn't know how to install just that much or load that much in order to install your program somewhere.  It would be nice to have some links to pertinent documents suitable for getting started on repairing this, or should I just wipe it all and start over from an empty drive? 

Thanks

Kiwi

[boyans.net]

If you had XP and Vista you know how to dual boot ;)

Take out old drive, put new drive in, make two partitions, a smaller for XP, a bigger for W7.

Make XP partition active, install XP there.

Boot again from Windows 7 install DVD, install W7.

You will have a dual-boot. 

For renaming boot entries you can use Visual BCD Editor.

(Try Dual-boot Repair for Windows 10 - it can fix XP, 7, 8, 10 boot)

[The Kiwi]

I'd hoped there was an editor to allow me to save a days' work setting the pair of them up; I've tried bootrec and bcdedit, from the Windows7 install DVD, and there doesn't seem to BE any contents in the BCD. 

I pulled our a different Hard Drive and have started on installing Windows XP once again. 

This is the first time that either Vista or Windows 7 ever pulled anything similar to this.  The copy of Windows 8.1 I'm running on a laptop is a stand-alone.  That's what it came with. 


Kiwi 

[boyans.net]

You need only two tools to fix Window Vista/7/8/10 booting:

1. bootsect.exe

2. bcdboot

Read at least some pages on boyans.net, fixing boot is explained for MBR and for UEFI boot.

There is no need to repeat text from existing web pages here.

try google with "boyans.net + boot sequence"