Two months ago my motherboard died, so I bought a used computer that came with Windows 7. I have since installed my old hard-drive, which had Windows XP on it, in this system.


What I am trying to do now is to figure out a way to migrate the settings from XP's BOOT.INI into 7's boot-loader.

Below is the BOOT.INI I used in XP (I have reduced the strings and updated the disks to point to the new location of the old HD. Oh and I am not clear on the drive letters. In XP, I could boot the recovery console or MS-DOS from a file in C:\ that contains the boot-sector. I am not sure what drive letter it would be called now—I had to manually change all the drive letters of the old partitions in Windows 7 because it auto-assigned them all wrong/differently).

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP (Safe)" /safeboot:network /sos /bootlog /noguiboot
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Recovery Console" /cmdcons
C:\BOOTSECT.DOS="MS-DOS 7.10" /win95

I have looked around, and have only been able to find some bcdedit commands to add XP to the boot-loader, but none that include information on setting safe-mode for it (or changing any of the XP load options for that matter). Not surprisingly I suppose, I have not found anything on adding the XP recovery console or DOS to the Windows 7 boot-loader.

(Yes, I tried EasyBCD, but that did not help; it had no options for XP, and the best I managed was to get a choice of booting 7 or normal-mode XP—choosing XP didn't even give the old XP boot menu.)


Can anyone please tell me how to export the entries in XP's boot.ini to 7's boot-loader so that on boot, I can choose to load the following:

Windows 7
Windows 7 (Safe-mode)
(Windows 7 (The Win7 counterpart of the Recovery Console))
Windows XP
Windows XP (Safe-mode)
Windows XP (Recovery Console)
MS-DOS 7.10