OS install order

[soewhaty]

Wasn't sure if I should post in the Storage forum or in any of the OS's but since it's a cross-OS question .. decided to post here. Well, the post concerns Win7 and Win10 cos i have both of them installed. I am on a notebook pc, HP, and it has 2 drive slots. In 1 I have my ssd where my os's are and in the 2nd slot i got a 1tb hdd. I've partitioned my SSD and have my 2 OS's there. The question now is - does it matter in what order my OS's are installed? I'm asking cos i once read it should be first the old one and then the newer one, but as you can see from the screenshot it's the opposite in my case. Is it a problem? The reason it is opposite is because at first I had installed 2 win7 on those 2 partitions, but then the Windows7 on the 1st partition got messed up so I was left with the 2nd one and was using it for quite some time until I decided to install Win10 in the place of the 1st Win7, the messed-up one, that is. That's how I ended up with the setup of having Win10 installed first and Win7 after it. I am sure it was on Tom's where I read that the order must be - first the older OS,win7, and then the newer, win10. Does it really matter? Any opinion, pls?

 

[Russel Johnson]

Everytime you boot from that drive it will just ask you which operating system you want to boot from

 

[SBMfromLA]

Yes... Old should be installed first. If you have two of the same... you can simply upgrade one of them to Windows 10. I did that when I had a dual boot.

 

[soewhaty]

@ Russel Johnson - Yes, and I'm absolutely ok with that and I expect that and I NEED that. All I was asking was if it is ok to have them installed in that order as the OP says? Does the order matter (in terms of anything) or not?

@ SBMfromLA - thanks, but how does it make any difference? In my case it's too late now cos as I said I no longer have 2 x Win7. I used to have that but in the place of the 1st Win7 I installed Win10. So now it's first Win10 and then Win7, which you are saying is not optimal and I just want to learn why in order to decide if I should bother reinstall stuff... thanks

 

[R_1]

from what I remember in school. you literally had to setup the OS oldest first. install DOS, use DOS to install winnt, use winnt to install win95, etc.
this is because windows 98 will not let you install win 95, 3.1, anything older. try to setup win 7 on a win 10 PC, it won't let you. that is not to say there is no way to do it, as you have done it.

all partitions are ntfs so I do not see a problem.

 

[soewhaty]

thanks ... i don't FEEL a problem and that's why i asked cos i wanted to know what the fuss was all about. Indeed my pc is from 2011 and it came with win7 preinstalled. Since then i've had all 4 of win7 8 8.1 and 10 installed at one point or another without any problem and regardless of the order of install. And I already described how i ended up with this mixed order, which i have now. I know it may seems strange to ppl that Win10 is located first on the drive and then comes 7, but ... back in the days when I had the 2 win7's i could easily switch btwn the 2 and decide which 1 i wanted to boot to. So when the 1st one died, I naturally booted to the 2nd one. Don't see a problem here. After some time, I simply installed Win10 on the place of the dead Win7 and presto ... no issues at all... everything boots as expected and I can switch to whichever OS I want. That's why @SBMfromLA's post puzzled me.

 

[R_1]

as long as the boot loader is letting you choose between the two, the entire SSD is ntfs, (ntfs has been known to corrupt fat partitions on the same physical drive), and everything is working I cannot foresee an issue, you do not use one OS to update the other so the drive mappings should not be an issue.

Multi booting was my thing for a while, then I got my current machine and VM's made much more sense for me.
My main is Mint and I host win7, win10, ubuntu, suze, puppy, freenas, and others in virtualbox, my secondary is win 7. I never boot it

 

[soewhaty]

well ... i hope @SBMfromLA read that last post...

 

[soewhaty]

as long as the boot loader is letting you choose between the two, the entire SSD is ntfs, (ntfs has been known to corrupt fat partitions on the same physical drive), and everything is working I cannot foresee an issue, you do not use one OS to update the other so the drive mappings should not be an issue.

Multi booting was my thing for a while, then I got my current machine and VM's made much more sense for me.
My main is Mint and I host win7, win10, ubuntu, suze, puppy, freenas, and others in virtualbox, my secondary is win 7. I never boot it

Yeah but with VM you split the resources in two, no? A part goes for your actually running OS and the rest for the virtual OS or OS's? So with ppl with limited resources this ain't really a great option. Correct me if I'm wrong

 

[R_1]

as long as the boot loader is letting you choose between the two, the entire SSD is ntfs, (ntfs has been known to corrupt fat partitions on the same physical drive), and everything is working I cannot foresee an issue, you do not use one OS to update the other so the drive mappings should not be an issue.

Multi booting was my thing for a while, then I got my current machine and VM's made much more sense for me.
My main is Mint and I host win7, win10, ubuntu, suze, puppy, freenas, and others in virtualbox, my secondary is win 7. I never boot it

Yeah but with VM you split the resources in two, no? A part goes for your actually running OS and the rest for the virtual OS or OS's? So with ppl with limited resources this ain't really a great option. Correct me if I'm wrong

limited resources check but, my rig is 7 years old, 955 black at stock, 8GB RAM, and hd6970.
my resources are somewhat limited (an i3 6100 will destroy my rig) and I can still run several at the same time.

I would not try a VM with less than a dual core, fortunately most people have a multicore setup, RAM is a big issue, but anything over 4 should suffice for at least one VM. unless you have a pentium the VM issue should not be that crippling, if you have an AMD APU multitasking is where they shine.

what are your resources?

 

[soewhaty]

as long as the boot loader is letting you choose between the two, the entire SSD is ntfs, (ntfs has been known to corrupt fat partitions on the same physical drive), and everything is working I cannot foresee an issue, you do not use one OS to update the other so the drive mappings should not be an issue.

Multi booting was my thing for a while, then I got my current machine and VM's made much more sense for me.
My main is Mint and I host win7, win10, ubuntu, suze, puppy, freenas, and others in virtualbox, my secondary is win 7. I never boot it

Yeah but with VM you split the resources in two, no? A part goes for your actually running OS and the rest for the virtual OS or OS's? So with ppl with limited resources this ain't really a great option. Correct me if I'm wrong

limited resources check but, my rig is 7 years old, 955 black at stock, 8GB RAM, and hd6970.
my resources are somewhat limited (an i3 6100 will destroy my rig) and I can still run several at the same time.

I would not try a VM with less than a dual core, fortunately most people have a multicore setup, RAM is a big issue, but anything over 4 should suffice for at least one VM. unless you have a pentium the VM issue should not be that crippling, if you have an AMD APU multitasking is where they shine.

what are your resources?

My resources are good, I was just asking in general to get some general knowledge! Indeed I was thinking the RAM would be the resource most at risk. In my case I'm sorta ok, as I said - 8gb DDR3 PC3-10600, quad Intel Core i7-2670QM, Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD where the OS's are and a 1tb HDD for storing stuff [yep, got 2 drive slots ], a discrete AMD Radeon HD 6770M and an on-board Intel® HD Graphics 3000 [I never use the AMD GPU cos it simply overheats my HP Pavilion dv7-6b76eo and just stay on the Intel one cos it's good nuff]!

 

[soewhaty]

limited resources check but, my rig is 7 years old, 955 black at stock, 8GB RAM, and hd6970.
my resources are somewhat limited (an i3 6100 will destroy my rig) and I can still run several at the same time.

I would not try a VM with less than a dual core, fortunately most people have a multicore setup, RAM is a big issue, but anything over 4 should suffice for at least one VM. unless you have a pentium the VM issue should not be that crippling, if you have an AMD APU multitasking is where they shine.

what are your resources?

So when I set up a new OS as a VM (in my case my host is 7 and the VM I'm trying to setup is Mint) how should I split the RAM - in half or in favour of any one of the 2 os's?

Does Oracle's VirtualBox not allow 64-bit VM installs because of disabled 'Hardware VT' in BIOS? Seems to be the case. Before I enabled it, it didn't even allow me to select a 64-bit install. After I enabled it the list got populated to now be able to select 64-bit setups as well. Nice!

 

[R_1]

it will ask when you are setting up the resources how much RAM to dedicate to the machine.
I personally find that a core and 2GB of ram will run most anything, 7/8/10 you will want 2 cores and more ram (3-4GB) per VM.

Hardware VT relies on the Processor to support hardware virtualization. your i7 should be well supported. you may need to enable the feature in the BIOS as it can be disabled.

 

[soewhaty]

it will ask when you are setting up the resources how much RAM to dedicate to the machine. I personally find that a core and 2GB of ram will run most anything, 7/8/10 you will want 2 cores and more ram (3-4GB) per VM.

Hardware VT relies on the Processor to support hardware virtualization. your i7 should be well supported. you may need to enable the feature in the BIOS as it can be disabled.

'a core and 2GB of ram will run most anything' and '7/8/10 you will want 2 cores and more ram (3-4GB) per VM' sorta confused me as they are somehow different opinions, but trial and error will lead to the right selection. Still, thanks for your input. It is appreciated a lot

 

[R_1]

it will ask when you are setting up the resources how much RAM to dedicate to the machine. I personally find that a core and 2GB of ram will run most anything, 7/8/10 you will want 2 cores and more ram (3-4GB) per VM.

Hardware VT relies on the Processor to support hardware virtualization. your i7 should be well supported. you may need to enable the feature in the BIOS as it can be disabled.

'a core and 2GB of ram will run most anything' and '7/8/10 you will want 2 cores and more ram (3-4GB) per VM' sorta confused me as they are somehow different opinions, but trial and error will lead to the right selection. Still, thanks for your input. It is appreciated a lot

sorry let me clarify, a core and 2 GB will run almost anything (linux,XP,Vista,95,98,NT) even OS's like 7/8/10 etc it will run, but run slowly and so you will want more resources and I have found that 2 cores for the OS's mentioned will perform without too much waiting around.