On installing Windows 7 Beta as a 2nd operating system in a blank partition, I had a dual boot option, but when I clicked on "previous operating system", I was put into the Recovery Console. Clicking the "recovery console" caused the computer to hang. Thus, I would have lost the ability to boot my Vista OS except for the fact that I use BootItNG and was able to reenable its boot options. If I had not had the recovery console installed, I cannot say whether the same thing would have happened. Strangely enough, the Recovery console was installed in my previous WinXP system, not in Vista and Windows 7 supposedly overwrote that partition to install. I'm not sure how this could have occured, unless Windows 7 installs its own recovery console.

Windows 7 creates a 200Meg partition when installing. That is probably what over wrote your boot sector.

I heard many people saying the same thing. Most were able to restore the boot secor in recovery console.

I install to separate disk and shutoff the Vista disk.

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That was not exactly my problem. I could boot, but the item on the dual boot menu that said "previous operating system" or similar words, did not boot to Vista but to the recovery console, which would not even work because it asked for a non-existant password. (Probably because it was not a Vista/Win 7 recovery environment). I don't know how it accessed a Recovery Console to begin with, as it should have been deleted when win7 was installed to the partition where I used to have WinXP. Very strange. By the way, the item on the boot menu that referred to the recovery console did boot to the console, with the same results: it would not run. I was mistaken when I said it hung.

That is a new one. I haven't heard of anyone having that problem.

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I have been dual booting Xp service pack 3 with Win 7 Beta. Today while in Xp working in Photoshop cs I kept getting to low on ram message when trying to save a photo to .jpeg. I have 4gig of ram. I closed PhotoShop and decided to reboot to free up ram. Upon reboot got error message and couldn't boot to Xp or Win 7. Put in Win 7 disc and did repair but now I no longer have dual boot option computer goes directly into Win 7. How can I rebuild my MBR to dual boot again?

Try booting from the XP CD and do fdisk /mbr from the command line of the recovery console. If that doesn't work try a repair install.

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I know this is an old post but EasyBCD can rectify this problem .. i lost dual boot because i had to reinstall my Windows XP OS via full backup archive (and the Archive was made in Paragon Drive Backup one day before i installed Windows 7 as dual boot) so my dual boot was lost , ... but with EasyBCD (it searches for other OSes) two clicks and i had dual boot back . EasyBCD is freeware and can be found > Here.