Dual Boot time?

[Iforgotart]

well ive tried before, and failed, so now i come to you, the beatiful people

can someone really explain to me how to make a dual boot with win xp and win 7, i already have the partitions divided up, now for the installation, heres where i want your help.... atm i have windows 7 installed with a windows xp disk....

ill ask please if you direct me to one of the tuts on this site, explain it for me, because imo there very unclear,

thanks, mad reps ++++ iforgot

 

[Brink]

Hello Iforgotart,

Since you have Windows 7 already installed, then use METHOD TWO step by step in the tutorial below. Everything is explained in full detailed there. If you are unsure or have a question about a step while doing it, then please post back. We will be happy to try and help you here with it.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

Shawn

 

[Iforgotart]

wow, i feel retarded now, i never noticed the bottem parts of the tuts, i only noticed like the about, and info, and **** like that, never noticed the actual tuts, no wonder i here such good things bout the tuts on this site... thanks... helped me alot.

 

[Brink]

LOL, you're welcome. Don't feel bad, we all have our senior moments.

 

[Night Hawk]

Hello Iforgotart Welcome to SF!

That's an excellent guide to start with seen there. From personal experience you may want to consider installing XP last and adding that into the 7 boot options but note the EasyBCD tool often recommended was written for Vista and will replace the new 7 boot screen with Vista when installed.

But you can easily remove XP later by simply reformatting the second primary partition when done with XP! That's the advantage there.

For installing the older XP first on the first primary the 7 installer will automatically pick XP up during the installation without the need for a 3rd party tool. But once you go to remove XP later... oops?! You would need to spend time rebuilding the 7 boot informaiton all over. If you simply reformat or delete the XP Primary 7 won't load afterwards since the 7 installer placed the boot files there.

I thought I would prepare a little for the choices and the problems you will run into later once you decide 7 is the one to stay with! I know, I know! It may be a bit premature for you but.....

 

[DeaconFrost]

If you post your system specs, we could give you a better answer, but if your processor supports VT, why not just run XP Mode? There's very little, to no reason to dual boot anymore.

 

[Perrybucsdad]

Frost, does the VT allow you to hook up USB devices and use them? That was my only hang up with them before. I haven't tried it with W7 yet.

 

[DeaconFrost]

VT is just the technology that allows virtual machine software and it's guest OSes to run better. If the VM software, such as VirtualBox, Virtual PC 2007, etc is configured to allow USB devices it will. XP Mode is a little different animal, and doesn't necessarily run a full VM...it just runs an application in an enhanced "compatibility" mode, which would still give it full access to all hardware. VM software has been able to use USB devices for a few years now, though. When I swapped my wife's PC to Vista three years ago, we couldn't find drivers for an older Canon scanner she used, so we loaded up XP in Virtual PC, and installed the scanner there.

 

[Night Hawk]

The XP Mode sees full integration there with ready access to usb flash drives just as you would see with a normal installation on the hard drive. The usb lazerjet printer here has yet to work on the XP Mode RC however.

As for the SUN Portable Virtual Box it allowed custom installs from the dvd drive as well as seen when installing Windows on a vhd through the Virtual PC in 7. But to transfer files from the hard drive onto the virtual drive the VPBox uses I actually have to use the Gladinet Cloud Desktop to upload to the WLM SkyDrive custom folder there and proceed to download onto the VB!

 

[DeaconFrost]

You can set up Shared Folders in VirtualBox just like VirtualPC. I have all of my Windows VMs map my host's D drive (data) as the Z drive inside the VMs.

 

[Night Hawk]

The advantage of integration seen with the XP Mode is the lack of any need for it since you already have full access to internal drives along with the optical and usb flash drives for direct transfers. On the VHDs where Windows was custom installed you would need shared folders there however.

The only time the dvd drive and not even the second optical drive installed is available for the custom installs on vhds however is during the installation itself when starting up the VPC simply while the bootable media is in the drive. Instead of seeing the XP Mode start up if installed you see the media active at that time and begin to load. Boot your live cd while in Windows!