Dual Boot XP and Windows 7 (each) on TWO Individual Hard Drives

[japentz]

Hello,


This really should be very simple yet, I am unable to find a straight, direct answer. Respectfully, please do NOT link the dual boot on "one" hard drive from the sevenforums.com Been there done that. It does not apply.

TWO SATA Drives - want an OS on each, dual boot menu upon boot up.

1. I have Windows 7 Ultimate (64 bit) ALREADY installed on a SINGLE (SATA) hard drive.
2. I have a clean blank other SINGLE (SATA) hard drive upon which I will install Windows XP Professional (32-bit).
3. Please understand this is TWO individual hard drives, I want an Operating System installed on each individually. (win7 on ONE, XP on the other)
4. I'd like a boot menu to come up giving me a choice to boot to either the Win7 drive OR the Win XP Prof. drive.


Sorry for over repeating what I want to happen, but wow, every place I've been has a meandering of "what to do" and no direct "how to".

Thank you kindly for a direct, precise response.

Regards ,
JP

 

[NickM]

Why do you have to go into Bios to change boot order.

I have XP and Vista on two pair of raid0 HDDs. (also had Win 7 RC on a 3rd seperate HDD for a while).
You set the boot prioity to the drive most often used. When you power on you hit F12 (Gigabyte MB) during post. This brings up a list of drives to boot from, ie HDD1, HDD2, SSD, DVD what ever, you select and computer boots to that drive - This DOES NOT change boot prioity. If you reboot it will revert back to drive set in bios.

This method is much better than screw*(%^#@$ with a inbetween software boot loader."


"... I was getting at, you do not need to go to Bios and change boot order. I over simplified explaination. But I do perfer this method over the software boot manager."

Thank you very much for the reminding about BOOT MENU option. - The best answer indeed.

 

[pro_mons]

May I just relate what happened to me:

Used to have just the IDE HD XP for a long time. No prob til I decided to upgrade to a bigger SATA on Win 7. Though the xp hd was left in the system, I disabled/disconnected it so mobo couldn't recognize it. For awhile it was trouble free computing with Win 7. After many years, SATA eventually crashed and I was forced to activate on IDE XP for the time being until I bought a new SATA and installed Win 7 on it with the IDE XP still connected. Everything worked great and the bootloader made me choose at startup between Win 7 and "Earlier version". I even bcdedited to 10 secs before Win loads to default 7, and renamed "Earlier version" to "Win XP". But the problem was...I lost the sound in XP. No amount of patching restored its HD Audio. Maybe it was because I had an on board sound and the device driver didn't take too well in sharing itself between 2 OS's. I dunno. It was really annoying. The solution was I just had to re-install the XP. If I wanted an MBR again, I needed to re-install Win 7 as well (or repair it) because the XP installation will screw up the 7. At any rate, I didn't want to be re-installing one OS after the other everytime the dual boot messes up. So in re-installing XP, I disconnected the SATA Win 7, treated the installation independently and isolated the other HD. And when I boot, it's just hotkey (F11 for MSI mobos) startup making me choose between the IDE (XP) or SATA (7).It isn't as neat as the bootloader but it will do the trick and it will hopefully spare me of annoying bugs because Win 7 and XP just don't seem to like each other lol. Just narrating my experience for what it's worth.

 

[Batlan]

I have a similar situation but with some differences. I have built a new Windows 7 Pro 64 bit computer with a SSD drive which houses the primary software and a WD 1TB SATA HDD for lesser software and data. I have an older Windows XP Pro computer with all my software and data on a single IDE HDD. I am wanting to copy all IDE 111GB HDD contents (software and data) onto a new WD SATA 250GB HDD and add this HDD to the new system. Since the operating systems are already loaded, would the F12 method of selecting boot drive locations suffice? If not, please clarify. If so, any trouble copy software/files/data from the Windows XP drive to the Windows 7 drive? It is my plan to move the more important software, files, data and functionality to the new computer (and, whenever possible, to the Windows 7 drive) and possibly maintain the old computer for less important functions. I am assuming I will have to load SATA drivers into the old computer for the new drive to function within the old computer to accomplish the copying of the information from old IDE HDD to the new SATA HDD. I am resorting to this because I am not knowledgeable enough to set up the at-home network to allow data transfer directly between the two computers. Any help appreciated. Thanks

 

[rwright0890]

I am actually asking about a similar situation:

I had a Dell computer running XP from a SATA HD. I now have a Compaq(HP) running pre-installed Win 7 Home Edition. I plugged in the old XP drive into the Compaq, hoping to be able to boot from the old XP drive using the BIOS to select it, as covered in this thread.

The problem is that, though the BIOS recognizes it, and begins to boot from the old drive, the XP splash screen shows only briefly, then I get a blue screen error. The drive is OK, as it still boots fine in the old computer.

I am suspecting that I need some specific drivers for the new motherboard, but the new computer came with no disks, and I wouldn't know how to get them to work with the old drive, anyway.

HELP?

 

[NickM]

I am actually asking about a similar situation:

I had a Dell computer running XP from a SATA HD. I now have a Compaq(HP) running pre-installed Win 7 Home Edition. I plugged in the old XP drive into the Compaq, hoping to be able to boot from the old XP drive using the BIOS to select it, as covered in this thread.

The problem is that, though the BIOS recognizes it, and begins to boot from the old drive, the XP splash screen shows only briefly, then I get a blue screen error. The drive is OK, as it still boots fine in the old computer.

I am suspecting that I need some specific drivers for the new motherboard, but the new computer came with no disks, and I wouldn't know how to get them to work with the old drive, anyway.

Old but not forgotten.)
Might be helpful what worked for me on old Dell Dimension 3100 DV051 and Dimension E520 DM061 recently.

In one case a non-native (non-Dell) hard drive simply did not want to boot from SATA-1, but works fine on SATA-2.

In another case the original Dell settings in BIOS are RAID (despite the Dell PC came with the only one hard drive).
So, in order to boot a non-native drive, I had to change the settings. Either in BIOS or in Windows settings.
I did not want to change the BIOS settings.
So, I installed a PCI disk-controller card temporarily, and connected the non-Dell drive to it. That helped me boot the non-Dell drive, and to make all necessary setting changes in Windows for RAID.
After that it became possible to boot the non-Dell drive from one of SATA ports on the motherboard.

 

[djNCD]

If you r having trouble running the dual boot install xp on one drive them win7 on the other please make sure your motherboard auto switches modes during boot from 32 to 64. If not you may have to install win7-32. Otherwise you'll have to go into bios each time you switch os.

 

[cmptrgydv]

well I will tell you how I once did this, not wanting a dual boot menu, I have a hot swap bay so I set my hot swap drive as first boot drive, installed XP on it, then installed win7 on internal drive, when I take the hot swap drive out it boots win7 I push hot swap drive in it boots XP

 

[shivashakti7981]

Hello,

I fell on this topic because I wanted a solution where I could choose between booting XP or 7, and I found. The F12-thing is just great!

But while reading I discovered that the way I had installed XP should have given me a lot of problems. I have two SATA drives configured with AHCI and on one one of them I have been running Win7 pro 64bit for some time. But I cannot use an old printer driver (Adobe Press Ready) with Win7 and it gives better prints then HP's PCL driver. So I installed XP on the other drive using a slipstreamed XP 32bit disk with SATA drivers. It installed with no problems, but of different reasons I did the installation 2 or 3 times more. The interesting thing is that it didn't touch the Win7 boot loader even if I had not detached the drive during the XP installation.

Regards,
Erling