dual booting 7 with xp

[montyuk]

just a quick question to those who have already played around with windows 7

are there any unexpected snags involved when creating a dual boot with a pre-existing xp installation and then installing w7 on a second drive on the machine?

any issues i should know about before putting in the dvd and rebooting?

i remember from vista that it didn't like being the second os, is w7 the same?

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

Sorry I can't answer your question. But I just want to add that Vista actually loves being the second OS. As long as you install it to a different drive or partition it sets up a dual boot, leaving xp intact. I really doubt they would change this behavior for windows 7. MS really wanted to make it easier for people to test the OS before committing to it.

 

[hannibal]

Windows 7 is just dusted Vista, so no difference in installing I supose.

Pauli

 

[amdfangirl]

Install on separate hard drives. Saves headaches.

 

[captaincharisma]

or even better find some virtual machine software like VMware or the free virtualbox and install it in that

 

[jeteryankees22]

Yeah, I would either go with a different hard drive because it is not fully tested and you never know what could happen...or go with a virtual machine to do the same thing

 

[montyuk]

i tried dual booting but had some issues, so ended up disconnecting my main drive and installing on the spare, just made things easier and means i dont have to worry about win7 installing stuff on my xp drive.

 

[Tindytim]

If you tried Build 7000, you don't need to boot from it. Just format a partition as NTFS, and mount a the ISO (or pop in the burnt disc), while still running XP. From there is will start the install, and when it restart you no longer need the disc and it will finish the install.

 

[mdma35]

Working with XP and 7 on same hard drive on different partitions for some time didnt have any problems,the bootloader 7 uses is far better and advanced then ntldr XP file.Also any issue about dual boot can be fixed in 7 with BCDEDIT /? from command line

 

[montyuk]

sounds like a issue with ya keyboard rather than a problem with a particular os, does the keyboard work if you press f8 and try to choose safe mode or one of the other options?

 

[mdma35]

lol man if you use USB keyboard just enable USB keyboard support in Bios there is no problem with bootloader

 

[mdma35]

ahh yes i understand maybe try to clear cmos taking the battery out for sometime but this probably wont help then flash new bios

 

[Guest]

You can do anything you want - boot from same hd, boot from logical even, any order, other hard drives doesn't matter...

If you want all your questions answered in detail this is the best:

http://www.defonso.com/clone

The document only covers XP, but you'll be 99% of the way there and it will catch all your mistakes, my guess is MS won't change much and booting 7 will be much like it is for XP, you will have to do some checking to see if hexediting the first sector of the partition still matters.

 

[daren253]

Portlock Leap Frog does this easily, no second hard drive needed, the local hard drive does not need to be partiioned. Its easy and quick.You can keep both XP and WIndows 7 or Vista for that matter and have a dual boot system.

http://www.portlock.com/products/leap_frog/