Dual Boot With W7 And XP With Two Hard Drives

[Hiskid]

I have a M2010 running W7 ultimate using raid. I was wondering if I put in a hd in the secondary spot if I could add XP Pro and dual boot. I have some things that work better under XP. I put my old laptop drive in and set the bios raid to auto detect/ata. It booted to 7 and installed drive E:. I didn't change any Matrix software settings so it's a raid/non raid setup. Thanks for any help. GBY

 

[pbcopter]

Hi,
Welcome to the forum.

I would disconnect the Windows 7 drive, then install XP on the new drive.
Then reconnect the Windows 7 drive a boot to it.
Then using a program such as EasyBCD (it's free), add XP to the boot menu.

 

[MilesAhead]

Assuming your old laptop drive is slower than your system drive, why would you want to boot XP off a slow drive? Carve off a partition on the system drive. Install XP to it. Use the slow laptop drive for data.

 

[gregrocker]

Best to boot Dual Boot via the BIOS, setting preferred OS HD to boot first, then choosing the other by tapping the one-time BIOS Boot Menu key at boot.

Install XP with RAID unplugged to achieve this.

 

[Hiskid]

Thanks for the welcome. So should I just unplug the primary drive and let it go to the secondary drive? I was just going to boot with the cd rom and have it choose to
load on drive E:.

 

[gregrocker]

If you install XP with Win7 HD plugged in it will steal the boot from Win7, requiring repair of Win7 to boot independently.

Take advantage of the benefit of having separate HD's for this Dual Boot: Unplug WIn7 while installing XP, then boot chosen OS via the BIOS so they remain independent drives without assorted complications.

If you don't like this arrangement, you can install EasyBCD to Win7 to add XP to a Dual Boot menu.

 

[Hiskid]

Assuming your old laptop drive is slower than your system drive, why would you want to boot XP off a slow drive? Carve off a partition on the system drive. Install XP to it. Use the slow laptop drive for data.

The drives are about the same. One just has more gb..

 

[Hiskid]

Thanks all, I'll give it a go. My last question. Does it matter if the XP drive isn't raid.. Should I change any Intel Matrix settings?

 

[gregrocker]

This varies with every mobo model. If it's recognizing the secondary now and holding its RAID then it's a good sign. Be sure to note the settings so they can be replicated if/when you unplug the RAID.

May I ask why you RAID Win7? We see a lot of problems with it and it doesn't seem to confer any benefit.

 

[Hiskid]

This varies with every mobo model. If it's recognizing the secondary now and holding its RAID then it's a good sign. Be sure to note the settings so they can be replicated if/when you unplug the RAID.

May I ask why you RAID Win7? We see a lot of problems with it and it doesn't seem to confer any benefit.

It was set up like that. I guess it was turned on and left like that when they deleted/upgraded the original XP Media Center..Ironically it still has a media center splash screen before W7 boots. I just got it non working on ebay for $250. I just re-greased the video card and reinserted the video card leaving the screws loose on one side. It booted up and has been working since. BTW, what settings should I note. This whole raid setup is new to me..Thanks...GBY

 

[gregrocker]

RAID has a control panel that boots first on the BIOS screen normally.

Are you sure you have two HD's linked into a RAID? Sometimes RAID setting is a generic one under SATA controllers.

 

[Hiskid]

RAID has a control panel that boots first on the BIOS screen normally.
Are you sure you have two HD's linked into a RAID? Sometimes RAID setting is a generic one under SATA controllers.

We'll the bios was RAID on with just the W7 and some matrix screen comes up. I didn't know if it would grab the second and connect it by RAID so I changed it to raid/ata.. I really don't know much about raid..

 

[gregrocker]

I've asked for some more help on RAID.

 

[Peregrine]

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]

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.

 

[MilesAhead]

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.

 

[Peregrine]

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.