help with 2 OS on one PC

[Guest]

Hi
I have WIN7 on HDD1 and XP on HDD2. In Msconfig/boot only WIN 7 is shown. I want both to show and to be able to choose which will start.
Izzy

 

[joslak]

since you have two different HDDs with an os installed on each one, both os's will not be listed. If you took one HDD and broke it into two partitions then it would list both, otherwise it will just boot to whichever drive is higher in the boot order.

 

[Alabalcho]

If both hard drives are bootable, change boot order from BIOS.
Check whether EasyBCD[/usr] can help.

 

[Solandri]

XP can only boot off the first HDD. That's why it won't show up as an option in msconfig. Win 7 can boot off a second HDD, but you may have to reinstall it to get that config to work.

Changing the HDD boot order in the BIOS is your easiest solution, but a lot less convenient compared to picking the OS from a list at boot time.

Have you considered converting XP to a virtual machine? That'll let you boot and run XP inside a window while you're running Win 7. No need to reboot to use XP.

XP is old enough that it'll run fine as a virtual machine, even on CPUs which don't support virtualization. VMWare Converter can convert an existing HDD to a virtual machine, which you can then run inside VMWare Player. VirtualBox is another popular option, which can work with files created by VMWare Converter. All are free.