Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Hello Antares,

Answers inline. :)

antares said:

I will be using Acronis Disk Director (a partition manager) to create the new partition where 7 will be installed, in the same disk where XP is already installed, so I will skip steps 1 A through E and use Acronis instead..is this ok? If so, it should be an unallocated partition? Or a primary, active....what type?

Yes, that would be fine to do. You can leave the partition as unallocated or primary. It doesn't matter since Windows 7 will recognize and format it during installation anyway.

After installing 7 (Steps 3 though 5), and if I want to revert back to a single partition with XP (delete 7), how should I delete 7? By going to XP, running Disk Manager and deleting the 7 partition?

Finally, installing EasyBCD in Win7 makes things more user friendly? I mean, deleting 7, etc.

Yes, from within XP, you could just delete the Windows 7 partition, then install EasyBCD in XP to remove the Windows 7 boot entry.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Antares,

This would be a more detailed issue and would be better in it's own thread if you should decide to do this, but here is the real basics on how.

Since you had XP installed first, the boot partition will be the XP partition. If you delete it from within Windows 7, then you will also need to do a startup repair (possibly up to 3 times) to repair and make Windows 7 the boot partition so Windows 7 will be able to boot.

Bootmgr is missing - Fix

Brink

I used your Dual boot Method 2. One question.

The XP OS is on the E partition. Should it be "Active"?
Didn't see this mentioned anywhere. Might have missed it.
As you can see I made the C- Win7 active but unsure if they are supposed to be active.

Thanks
Mike

Hello Mike,

Since Windows 7 was installed first, you would want to leave it's partition as active and not XP. Making the XP partition active in this case can make your system unbootable since the Windows 7 partition is your boot partition.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

That is it.

Thanks Shawn

Mike

You're most welcome Mike. :)

Antares,

It's not going to make any noticeable difference in performance on which OS is installed at the beginning of the drive.

To make it easier, you could just install Windows 7 on a 2nd hard drive to dual boot with your existing XP installation. This way all you would have to worry about is installing Windows 7 and all of the drivers and programs for it.