Dual boot timer gone?

[tractor]

Hi,
I've been dual-booting Vista and XP on one of my pc's for some time (1-2 years) and have never had issues.

I have been using XP almost exclusively for the last month and rarely boot into 7.
Today I restarted from the XP login screen and when it came back up the timer I had set to 8 seconds was gone and the computer never booted either OS. It did still show the correct default OS though.

I went into Win7 and made sure my settings were still set. They were and the box was checked for the timer still. I even chose Win7 as the default and restarted. It did move to Win7 as the default when the boot options menu came up, but still did not automatically count down.

What could be the problem?

Thanks!

[newtech]

I think that you will have to boot to intall dvd and use disk manager to set the active partition. I am in doubt that Windows XP messed up with the Windows 7 boot store. It should still work fine when the active partition points to Windows 7. Did you also try to hit F8 at boot time which might help. You have to watch for the option "Press any key..etc.

[tractor]

Disk manager is included on the Win7 install DVD then?

I will try F8 next time. I didn't know that affected boot options such as default OS.

Thanks