Dual booting XP and Windows 7

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devarinti

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
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I've a version of Windows XP home installed on my comp the way it is. My comp has two harddrives, one an old IDE 80 GB harddrive and another 500 GB sata harddrive that I recently installed. The IDE harddrive is basically full and it has the Windows XP installed on it. Now, I want to dual boot with XP and Windows 7. I'm wondering how I can do this without losing all the junk that I have on my comp.

I think this also means I've to partition the harddrive(s)?? I don't know how to do that either so suggestions would be lovely. I want to be able install the Windows 7 on the new 500 gig harddrive since there is still like 430 gigs of free space on that one.

Any responses are greatly appreciated.
 
Forget dual booting. VM's make much more sense now and 7's XP Mode is really great.
 
well i do use 3d acceleration and directx for gaming. Why those aren't gonna work??
 
Why can't you play your games in Windows 7 like the rest of us?

If I was you, I would copy all the data on the 80GB drive to the 500GB drive, then wipe the 80GB drive completely and install Windows 7 fresh on it.

You will have the 500GB drive as a purely data drive with no OS on it.

If you have an old app that won't run in 7 (not likely) then XP Mode will do fine.


Do you have an reason to need a fully bootable copy of XP anymore?
 
criccio said:
Why can't you play your games in Windows 7 like the rest of us?

If I was you, I would copy all the data on the 80GB drive to the 500GB drive, then wipe the 80GB drive completely and install Windows 7 fresh on it.

You will have the 500GB drive as a purely data drive with no OS on it.

If you have an old app that won't run in 7 (not likely) then XP Mode will do fine.


Do you have an reason to need a fully bootable copy of XP anymore?
Click to expand...

I don't... that's why I recommend going 7 only... :)
 
devarinti said:
well i do use 3d acceleration and directx for gaming. Why those aren't gonna work??
Click to expand...

XP Mode does not support 3d acceleration, and I've only seen VMWare support DirectX 8 3d acceleration (*and if I'm wrong on this part, PLEASE someone show me what VMWare products support 9.0c acceleration....would be a great help to me for multi-system testing), so any games you want to play will have to be played natively in Windows 7, or work under some form of compatibility mode.

On the other hand, if you REALLY need XP for 3d acceleration, leave it as is and install win 7 on new partition/new hard drive and dual boot.
 
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So how would I go about being able to boot into both my XP install and W7 install, with W7 already being installed before I did XP.
 
Install Windows XP on a seperate drive/partition, and it should setup the boot loader to select OS automatically (at least, it always has for me).
 
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