Solved Dual boot original Vista with Windows 7?

[Neverhavemoney]

Does anyone know if this is possible. I already had a look around in brinks tutorials and came up empty. Thansk everyone.
Ben

 

[Brink]

Hello Ben,

Yes. You would just need to have Vista installed first, then do a clean install of Windows 7 on another hard drive or partion.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Mark]

Yes most of us are dual booting with Vista with 0 problems, just create a partition or formate the drive you are going to install on and do your install from boot up and you will have the option of what partition you want to install on, select the one you want and start the install.

Once you have it installed it will be the default OS and if you want to change that just go into the start menu and type msconfig and you can change the default OS from there and you can change how long you want the boot options to stay there at start up.

If you want to access your Vista install from within windows 7 you will need to go to disk manager and assign a drive letter to your Vista partition and then you will be able to access it, although you may not have all the permissions when you want to access your vista user files and to gain permisions you can use this tutorial to help you.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1911-take-ownership-shortcut.html?ltr=T

 

[johnwillyums]

Hi Neverhavemoney and hello again Shawn and Ted.

I've been thinking about this dual boot with Vista 64 all week and have been much encouraged by this vid on a link provided by Mr Grim on around page 14 of the welcome thread:

Windows 7 Forums - How to dual-boot Windows 7 BETA on a Vista computer

Also I've downloaded the beta and just need to burn a disk and do it.

However , tonight I've been looking at my hard drives and realizing that I'm not that confident about partitioning them
.
It's a bit complicated. My disk 0 is my original hard drive and once had XP Pro on.
This has a 441GB volume which is my media stuff- thousands of image files+my music and a few movies
Then there are two partitions which used to contain Ubuntu and are now empty- one 23.6GB and one 1.06GB.

My Disk 1 is my c: drive and contains my boot, system, all programs etc.
This is a 466GB volume and that is where I'm thinking Windows 7 should go but I'm not sure.

When I had the Ubuntu install it was a while ago and it carried it's own partition tool. It was very straight forward and virtually idiot proof.
Problem is I can't remember much about it and I don't think it was typical because , as I say, Ubuntu did it for me.
It would be handy to slot it in where Ubuntu used to be- the two small partitions on my storage drive (0)- but I imagine that would mean some complex boot issues.

Basically I don't know how to proceed.

I'm not sure how well I've explained this but any help would be welcome, best to you all, John

 

[Brink]

Hi John,

It's pretty simple to do. You can do it from the Windows 7 installation disc during installation with the Drive (Advanced options) link. You can use the Extend option to shrink Disk 1 by how many MB you want for the Windows 7 partition. Afterwards, just select that new partition and continue installing Windows 7.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-beta.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Neverhavemoney]

Guys please help me.
Look at this post from vistax64.com!!!!

Help i lost vista! - Vista Forums

I think IM F#@!$%#@!$%@#$%@#$%!

 

[johnwillyums]

Nice one Shawn. The tutorial is very good. It's nearly midnight here so I'm going to leave this until tomorrow when I can concentrate better, but I think if I study this and the vid in the morning I can work myself up into a technical frenzy and have a go.
I'll let you know either way.
Neverhavemoney I hope you get your Vista back!
G'night, john

 

[Brink]

See ya later John.

 

[ceejay]

Just to back up what has been said, it's really easy to set up a dual boot config.

To paraphrase the more detailed instructions, it is essentially:

1) Format a new simple NTFS partition within your spare disk capacity using the built-in storage management feature in Vista. You are probably going to want at least 20GB of blank partition to install programs as well as the OS.

2) Autorun your Beta installation disc, and use the advanced install feature to select your newly created partition as the location for the Windows 7 install.

3) Windows 7 installs into the new partition. When this is completed, on restart you will now always get a boot screen option to select between Windows 7 and Vista. Windows 7 will be the default, but you can change the default back to Vista using the MSCONFIG utility within Windows (you can also reduce the autoselect timeout for OS on boot from 30 seconds to as low as you want using this utility).

4) Enjoy your new superfast clean install of Windows 7! You can even access your existing Vista files on other partitions / drives.

5) When it come to the time when you want to remove the beta, you can simply delete the whole Win7 partition from within Vista, but be aware that you might have to use your Vista recovery disk to rebuild the boot sector.

Finally, unless you are using a standalone PC to test windows 7, do not even consider doing an upgrade install over the top of your existing copy of Vista on a production machine. Don't forget this is Beta software that you are testing after all; you cannot rely on it to work without problems, and at the very best your licence will expire on 1st August.

Dual Boot has to be the way to go to ensure that you continue to have a supported installation, whilst now having the ability to experiment with Win7.

 

[johnwillyums]

Hi Ceejay, thanks for the reply.
I'm trying to shrink the volume on my c: drive in Computer Management-disk managment.
When I try to shrink volume I'm told there is only 56mbs and if I click shrink I get a error from logical disk manager saying access is denied.
56 mbs is not enough anyway but it won't let me do it.
This is a 500gb HDD with 352GB spare capacity so I'm doing something wrong.
Anyone help me out?
Thanks, John

 

[johnwillyums]

I've been browsing around and this seems to be a problem for a few people.
One suggestion was Easus Partition Manager. I downloaded a zip file of that but when I've extracted and tried to install as administrator and I get a warning that I am trying to install it on a 64 bit system. I click ok but nothing further happens.
I've done this several times and the Easus download page assures me this is the 64 bit version but it won't install.
At the moment I'm downloading MEPIS 7 which is also supposed to be 64 bit but it's taking a while.
This is turning out to be quite a hassle. Am I going about it the right way?
cheers, J

 

[johnwillyums]

Well I'm lost. I got MEPIS but then I realized it's a whole Linux OS so I don't really want to mess with that.
I downloaded EASUS partition manager professional edition and that enabled me to drag an unallocated space from the left of the diagram of my c: drive.
I'm not sure this is what I want but I tried to apply it and get told I have to buy the product before it will work.
Am I going about this the right way. help, John

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello John.

Have a look at this; it's said it is good but I haven't used it, not sure about 64-bit support.

GParted -- Welcome














Later Ted

 

[smarteyeball]

+1 gparted. Just be aware that moving unallocted space from the end of a drive to the begining will take a long time....

 

[Romulinx2]

Yes it works great. No problems at all when using dual boot with Vista ultimate 64bit & Win 7 64bit. I used an unused partition on one of my drives. It boots from "S" drive. Sounds much better than "C"......lol

 

[ceejay]

John,

I think the problem is that a partition requires contiguous allocation on a drive. If you have re-used a drive heavily prior to attempting a partition shrink the storage management software won't be able to identify sufficient space despite the fact your standard capacity meters shows loads.

In the first instance try to defragment all partitions on the drive where you want to create the new partition. Then re-try the shrink.

I have two HDDs in my desktop tower as I use the second 300GB drive for Vista backups in case my primary fails.

When I first tried to create the Win7 partition there by shrinking the single backup partition I had the same problem as you.

The multiple backup iterations were filling the drive anyway so I also took the opportunity to reformat the whole drive prior to re-partioning it. This may be more extreme than you are comfortable with doing, but it made creating the new partition easy.

(NB: I re-created the Vista backup in my new smaller backup partition prior to installing Win7!),

 

[SIW2]

Hi johnwillyums,

Here is a tutuorial - you shouldn't need to do the startup repair mentioned as installing Win 7 obviates the need for that.

Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista Partition :: the How-To Geek

Hope it helps

SIW2

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello SIW2.


I just wanted to say thanks, I bookmarked that page myself.

Thank you!













Later Ted

 

[johnwillyums]

Hi All and thanks for the replies and suggestions.

Unfortunately I've just had an incredibly frustrating afternoon and having wasted 6 cds, 2 dvds and 30 GBP I am no nearer creating a space for the Windows 7 Beta

I tried GParted, downloaded the latest iso folder and then struggled to burn it to a disk.
I have Easy CD/DA converter which I use all the time so I tried to create an image disk in that. It wouldn't do it.
I then downloaded IMGBurn and ISOImageBurner.
IMGBurn told me that it could not burn this type of file.
ISOimageburner appeared to do it but I have now tried about 6 disks and several permutations of the contents of the GParted live iso folder and they just won't boot.

With the disk that appears to have burned correctly it starts to boot and then I just get a black screen with a flashing cursor top left.
This goes on for ages until I get fed up and eject the disk at which point it boots into Vista as normal.

Frustrated by this, I went back to Easeus Partition Manager professional Edition 3.
This appeared to be very straightforward so I purchased it on line.
With this I get a UI with both my HDDs on it and options to resize/move my partition.
I dragged the cursor from the right hand side of the c: drive creating about 25Gb of unallocated space and clicked apply.
This resulted in a reboot and the partition manager appeared and 3 task bars began moving across as the task was completing.
I've tried it several times and each time I get this failure message:

"Failed to complete the batch operation.
Message (4101):failed to quarantine system partition"

I'm really fed up about this and have had a totally s**t afternoon plus it looks like I've wasted my money on this software.

anyone got any ideas where I'm going wrong?
Thanks, john

 

[Brink]

John,

Were you not able to shrink the partition from within the Windows 7 installion?

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...oot-original-vista-windows-7-a.html#post20771