Dual boot Windows XP & 7?

SeanW

Hey amigos;

I recently bought Windows 7 and have been backing up all my stuff in preparation. My PC has 3 hard drives, well one HD and 2 SSDs. I'd like to have a dual boot setup allowing me to use both, with XP on the smaller SSD and Windows 7 on the larger one.

It's been a while since I worked on the innards of my 'pooter, but I'm reasonably sure of the arrangement of HDs:

1. 16GB SSD, in the 'first' SATA slot, bootable. I want to reinstall XP here.
2. 750GB WD Caviar Green in the 'second' position, I put it there because it's got s*** response times and I only use it for storage, plus my mainboard seems to have some kind of master/slave arrangement even on the SATA channels. Drive not bootable for those reasons.
3. 64GB SSD, in the 'third' SATA position. I intend to put Windows 7 on this.

Question, should I just go ahead and reformat both SSDs then reinstall WinXP on the small one then put Win7 over it on the big one and will that give me a boot-time choice of operating systems? Or should I do something else?

Are there other things I should beware of like does Windows 7 have a new file system XP doesn't recognise?

Fysh

I'm dualbooting XP and 7, it's pretty straightforward.

If your BIOS is smart enough to let you choose what hard drive to boot from, I'd install & configure each OS with only that drive connected.

If you can't do this, I'd suggest you sort out XP first, then 7. You'll need to let the Windows 7 bootloader take control, as the XP bootloader doesn't have the ability to boot 7. If you install 7 first and then XP you end up having to run the Startup Repair tool on the 7 installation media to be able to boot 7, and then you have to use something like EasyBCD to add the option for booting XP.

wotzgoingon

Fysh wrote: »

I'd install & configure each OS with only that drive connected.

^
I dont think you should do that. As previous poster said install xp first but keep xp connect when insatlling W7 as if you didnt do that you would get no start up screen to select which os to boot.

SeanW

Fysh wrote: »

I'm dualbooting XP and 7, it's pretty straightforward.

If your BIOS is smart enough to let you choose what hard drive to boot from, I'd install & configure each OS with only that drive connected.

If you can't do this, I'd suggest you sort out XP first, then 7. You'll need to let the Windows 7 bootloader take control, as the XP bootloader doesn't have the ability to boot 7. If you install 7 first and then XP you end up having to run the Startup Repair tool on the 7 installation media to be able to boot 7, and then you have to use something like EasyBCD to add the option for booting XP.

Thanks for the pointers, though given that I'm going into unknown territory I'm leaning towards the second option & selecting an OS at each boot time.

wotzgoingon wrote: »

^
I dont think you should do that. As previous poster said install xp first but keep xp connect when insatlling W7 as if you didnt do that you would get no start up screen to select which os to boot.

That would be the idea: to select which drive to boot from in BIOS, allowing me to pick which HD to boot from and thus load the preferred OS by default, in preference to a selection at each boot time.

CptSternn

Wow, this is the third thread on this I found. Pardon me for reposting but...

Why would you dual boot with Windows 7? Google Windows 7 XP Mode - you can install it and open a window that is a shell running XP. It's basically a VM client for Windows 7 that runs a legit copy of XP for you.

Then again, you can always right click the icon of any app and tell it to run in any shell mode you want and 99% of the time that will make whatever app you are trying to run work perfectly in W7.

Dual booting these days of desktop VM is an archaic craft which is no longer used.

Fysh

CptSternn wrote: »

Wow, this is the third thread on this I found. Pardon me for reposting but...

Why would you dual boot with Windows 7? Google Windows 7 XP Mode - you can install it and open a window that is a shell running XP. It's basically a VM client for Windows 7 that runs a legit copy of XP for you.

Then again, you can always right click the icon of any app and tell it to run in any shell mode you want and 99% of the time that will make whatever app you are trying to run work perfectly in W7.

Dual booting these days of desktop VM is an archaic craft which is no longer used.

Perhaps because not everyone has hardware recent enough to allow the virtualised experience of system-intensive applications to be good enough to replace the experience of running the OS in question as host?

There will always be usage patterns that don't conform to what you think is The Only Way To Go. For instance, my department has a whole bunch of people who need to dual-boot to use stuff like Labview to run interface cards and control experimental equipment.

SeanW

Hi everyone, you all - Fysh in particular - gave me good advice, I just finished setting up a dual boot arrangement and so far so good

@CptSternn
My hardware is old an I don't have enough RAM (2GB) to do virtualisation, at least not effectively, I don't think. I have a lot of old software which is a concern, the first really old game I've tried has given unsolvable problems in Windows 7 as expected (though everything else works great and I'm happy to migrate).

I also have two high quality SSDs, and two sets of media+license (one each) for 7 and XP. Additionally, the Win7 boot loader seems to follow on from the WinXP one in being very flexible. I also know all about Windows 7 XP Mode (it's explained on the damn W7 box, among other places) so why would I need to Google it?