Installing XP after Windows 7

[migara_11]

i want to install windows xp to my pc. but alreay there exist windows 7. i want to use both windows xp & windows 7 operating systems.. how i install windows xp to my pc. i want advices step by step..thanks for you...!!

 

[WyomingKnott]

Gee, I posted on this a while back. Let's see how much I can reconstruct (or you could find my old post)

■ Back up a drive image of your OS first. If your experiments kill your OS, you just restore it and go on your merry way.

■ I hope that you have at least two disk drives. If you install an older Windoze OS on top of a newer one, you will generally lose the ability to boot the newer one. People who are really good with boot loaders could recover this using a third-party boot loader, but I am not such a person and, from your post, I will guess that you are not one either.

With two drives, you disconnect your Win7 OS drive, attach the drive that will contain XP, and install XP. You now have two drives that are bootable, and you use the BIOS to pick which one to boot. That way, there is no need to repair the boot sequence that the XP install overwrote.

■ The "right" way, for purists, is to attach a newly-formatted drive as the only drive in the machine, install XP, and then install 7. Your old install of 7? Do it all over again.

■ Why dual-boot to XP? If the reason is to run programs that won't run under 7 and did run under XP, you can download the XP compatibility add-on from uSoft and run these programs in XP mode. Less maintenance. But do the backup I recommended before installing XP mode, just in case.