Dual Booting

DeaconFrost said:

I'm saying this just to attempt to be helpful, and I will admit it is an assumption, but here goes: Based on some comments you've made, you seem to be getting a lot of bad advice from people who have been helping or teaching you in the past. For example, virtual machines are excellent methods of accomplishing what you want, but it seems as though someone soured you on them with negative comments. Second, you never had to open your case to set up a dual boot. Whoever told you that shouldn't be trusted for advice.

Now, if you don't want to take my advice on virtual machines...so be it. Many people still would rather go with the over-compicated, out-dated multi-boot setup. However, before doing anything else, post a screenshot of your disk management, like gregrocker suggested.

I've used various different Virtual OS programs, and I just find them too limiting. Playing games on them, for instance, is limited. The virtual programs I've used just don't have the full power as my hardware does. I've used MS's Virtual PC, Virtual Box and VMWare. I didn't like them. No offense to virtual OS's, but they just don't have the same thing as an OS.

Greg: My friend on FB is even more of a computer whiz than I am, I wanted his opinion as well as people's opinions from this forum. Can't go wrong with having more than 1.

Edit: The only thing I really do with my machine is playing computer games, and surfing the web, visiting forums, etc. There are a few games out there that won't work with Windows 7 correctly, so I installed Windows XP 64 to be able to play those older games, and maybe a few of the newer games, too.

gregrocker said:

If you have any problem setting up the Dual Boot, post back the requested screenshot as we can often spot the problem just looking it over.

   Note

In the Windows start menu right click computer and click manage, in the left pane of the "Computer Management" window that opens click disk management and post a snip of that.

How to Upload and Post a Screenshot and File in Seven Forums

Hello again Richard.


Good to see you got the system running and thanks for the update.



There are programs that do what you want but I never liked them so I can't remember a name for you, I'm sure someone else will come up with the correct name for you.

Richardc269 said:

Hi guys, I'm sorry for not posting before about the problems, or if I fixed them. And I've discovered WHY the dual-booting was screwing up: It was because I had my stupid flash drive plugged in while trying to install the second OS! Major "DOH!" moment. Anyway, for roughly the last 2 weeks, my dual-OS has been working fine. I can switch between both OS's without a problem.

I also have a question, and a little explanation with the question: Roughly 7 years ago, I had a roomate in my house named Mike. Now, Mike was a better computer user than I was 6 years ago, and roughly about this time, XP had been released for 3 years or so. Mike hated XP versus Windows 98 at the time, and he had a dual-boot of XP and 98. He also really hated the "choose an OS screen" when you started up the machine, so he created 2 little icons in his Quick Launch area. Both icons were created with the 98 and XP inside the icon, what the buttons did however, was if you clicked on one of them, it would restart the machine, skip the "choose an OS" screen, and go straight to the other OS, and if he shut down the machine, whichever button he had clicked on last, it would have started up into that OS without having to choose from the menu.

Now, does anyone else here know how to do that? I would like to do that, too. Except that it's of course, between XP and Windows 7 instead.

Probably quite easy to do. What they probably do is execute a batch file which sets the appropriate OS as the default, and set the delay to 0 which means that the default OS will be loaded upon restart. It could also be possible to choose whether to shutdown, restart, or continue in the current OS after executing the file, in which case the next boot will launch into the desired OS. I'm not sure on the implications of UAC though, since the required command BCDEDIT (from W7's perspective) needs to be invoked with administrative credentials and privileges.

This should work with both dual-boot and multi-boot systems. In both cases, if the desired OS isn't already the default (i.e. first in the boot order), the 2 entries involved (the current and desired) will be swapped over.