Dual Boot With W7 And XP With Two Hard Drives

Since you have Windows 7 Ultimate, a simpler approach might be to simply run XP Mode from within Windows 7.

Windows Virtual PC: Home Page

Hiskid said:

Peregrine said:

Since you have Windows 7 Ultimate, a simpler approach might be to simply run XP Mode from within Windows 7.

Windows Virtual PC: Home Page

Thanks, I'll check that out. I would rather have two independent os's.

it's not a big deal to add XP to an existing Windows 7 on the same physical drive. The whole trick is, once you fix the boot manager, then choose XP on boot it won't boot XP. You'll probably get "ntldr missing or corrupt" error. Because when XP installs in a partition other than the first, it still puts ntldr and ntdetect.com in the first partition. You boot the XP install to a command line and copy those 2 files into the partition where XP is. Takes like 5 minutes. Over 90% of the guides "how to add XP to a system with Windows Seven already installed" leave that step out. :) Once those 2 files are in the XP partition you reboot and it works as expected.

Hiskid said:

Peregrine said:

Since you have Windows 7 Ultimate, a simpler approach might be to simply run XP Mode from within Windows 7.

Windows Virtual PC: Home Page

Thanks, I'll check that out. I would rather have two independent os's.

XP Mode is Windows XP running in a virtual machine, so it is independent from Windows 7, sort of. XP Mode launches just like any other program within Windows 7 and depending upon your needs it could be a tidy solution. I've used it on my Windows 7 Professional computer and it's worked just fine for some XP programs that I prefer to run in Windows XP rather than in a compatibility mode in Win7.

Cheers.