Hi everyone
Nice forum, I installed Win 7 Ultimate with XP pro on the same partition, and after working out a couple glitches it's working fine.
I had XP sitting on a 290 gigs HD, and used the Diskpart command tool to shrink it to half the partition size so win& could install on the other half. Diskpart worked fine but it took many hours to rearrange the files before it made the secound partition, I went to bed and left it alone to do its job, in the morning Diskpart did show the size of the secound partition so I was able to install Win 7, it was quick and problem free.
The only glitch was the dual booting after the Post at boot up, the Windows boot manager window seem to have frozen. The keyboard would not make let me pick between the two OS. After playing around with the Bios I fixed the problem . It was related to USB settings.
So Now I could choose between Win XP Pro and Win 7 at boot up, but Win 7 still had a problem with the bootini process. So I was only able to access WinXP, Win 7 would stop loading once I moved the curser on the screen to Windows7 Ultimate. It also gave me the message that the operating system had a problem and need to be repaired with the help of the Windows 7 install disk.
So I did load the disk, booted from the CD player, let the fwindows files ignitiate etc, then clicked on the language
choice and the install 7 windows came up, on the side there is a Repair windows 7 link option to fix the problems with your system. It did rebuilt the booting up process and all is well for now. I'm no computer geek but I can follow directions. I think Windows 7 is great.
I hope all this make sense.
I used the help of some program to check and rename the entrie on the screen. Windows7 showed as Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered) so I renamed it to it's proper name. The program I used is EasyBCD. I actually used the program on both OS's to navigate from one to the other when the dual booting process did not work. Only the Default system would boot up. By either changing WinXP or Windows 7 to the default option i was able to acess both. It's a little wacko but it worked.