installed w7, then installed SL, now can't boot w7

[drpewpew]

Hi - i installed w7 on the first drive in my system (it's sata btw). I installed sL on the second. I can book SL no probs - but when i try to boot w7 it fails. If i try to go via chameleon i get a boot mgr missing error... anyone know if i can recover my w7 install? I don't want to have to install all over again If i DID reinstall would i lose my SL install too?

[TheGreatDeceiver]

Hi - i installed w7 on the first drive in my system (it's sata btw). I installed sL on the second. I can book SL no probs - but when i try to boot w7 it fails. If i try to go via chameleon i get a boot mgr missing error... anyone know if i can recover my w7 install? I don't want to have to install all over again If i DID reinstall would i lose my SL install too?

 

have you tried to unhook second hdd (or temporarily disable in BIOS) and see if win7 boots? It's not clear where the actual bootloader installed itself. Typically it picks up the windows bootloader as an option and works fine. At the moment you should be able to see the Windows 7 hdd from your SL installation fine (if everything is OK you should at least - if not, something else may have gone wrong).

In any case, if you install win7 on first hdd and SL on second a re-installation of either operating system to the same drive will not erase the installation of the other OS. It will only render the bootloader of the other OS non-functional (again, typically with chameleon it should still work, if you install win7 you definitely will loose the OSX bootloader but there are fixes - seel below).

 

here is what I would do. There are likely better methods. I am not claiming that this is the best

run your win7 installation DVD and do a repair. It will repair the mbr, provided that is the only thing that got hosed. You will loose the possibility to boot SL once you successfully repaired your win7 boot. Then you can use tboot option to boot into SL via boot.ini as explained here.