Dual boot win 10 & 7 on one HD

[fish54]

I have a dell desktop with windows 10. I created a partition and loaded win ultimate from original CD.

was connected to Ethernet when I installed win 7, problem is I have no connection to the internet in win 7. suggestions have been to download drivers etc but win 10 internet works just fine, so why would I change or have to load any drivers for win7 partition? please help clarify or give advice. when I look in devices, I see Ethernet does not have driver, network controller, sm bus controller and pci simple communications controller does not have driver. fish

 

[johndough]

Your Win 7 install is completely separate from your Win 10 install so you need ethernet drivers for Win 7 too.

 

[fish54]

Your Win 7 install is completely separate from your Win 10 install so you need ethernet drivers for Win 7 too.

 

[fish54]

Your Win 7 install is completely separate from your Win 10 install so you need ethernet drivers for Win 7 too.

So when I install drivers for win 7, it will not effect my Ethernet card from the currently functioning win 10 system? There can be two different Ethernet drivers on the same pc? Thanks for your response! Fish

 

[Math Geek]

right, nothing is shared between the 2 OS's. you have to install separate drivers, programs and set the settings the way you want individually.

i run 4 OS's on a single drive and each one is set up one by one. can be tedious but once they are all working, it's not so bad.

do keep notes of what you did to each since you may get mixed up. i also keep separate folders to store drivers and other OS specific programs. if it's only for win 10, then it's in the win 10 folder and so on. if it works for all, then it is in a folder labeled as such. keeps you from mixing everything up as time passes.

 

[Math Geek]

Your Win 7 install is completely separate from your Win 10 install so you need ethernet drivers for Win 7 too.

So when I install drivers for win 7, it will not effect my Ethernet card from the currently functioning win 10 system? There can be two different Ethernet drivers on the same pc? Thanks for your response! Fish

correct, you can make any changes you want to one OS and not effect the other at all. it's not active and not running so has no idea what you are doing to the other OS. do note that you can go to explorer and browse the files for either OS no matter which one is booted up. don't get silly and start messing with win 7 while booted into win 10 or other way around. you can mess up one of them that way and it won't be able to boot or have serious problems if it does.

it is a good idea to have a 3rd partition for your data. this way either OS can get to it. very hard to get to stuff from my documents in win 7 while booted to win 10. consider my documents a dead folder when dual booting. a 3rd partition is much easier and prevents data loss if something goes wrong and one or both OS's refuses to boot. you can format either Os partition and not mess with your data at all.