WIndows 7 and Windows XP dual boot

Good afternoon,

I'm wanting to make my laptop a dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7 machine. I've been looking at various guides online and most of them talk about using something like partition magic to alter partitions to keep your existing install intact.

I'm just going to wipe the lot and start from scratch so I'm not bothered about this, but I remember hearing you have to install them in a specific order due to the way the new boot loader works. Am I right in thinking I need install Windows 7 first and then Windows XP?

Many thanks,

Daniel

XP and then 7! :p

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Originally Posted by Blue_Cookeh

XP and then 7! :p

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Cheers, I knew someone would know of the top of their head. I'll do it that way round

I'm surprised how many people still use dual booting as a method of running two OS's on one PC especially in these days of cheap hard drives.

I've been put off trying dual booting after having read many forum posts where users are trying to rescue their trashed MBR's that are the result of setting up and removing dual booting config from a hard disk.

In my home system I have used 2 separate hard drives, one with win7 installed and XP on the other HDD, I select which OS I want to boot to by selecting the appropriate HDD in the quick boot menu in the bios, simple.

I find it's easier just to stick both on one disk and then redirect My Documents etc over to folders on a second disk. It's just the fact programs take up twice as much space then!

The other thing to consider is a virtual machine - depends on what you want XP for, but the XP mode VM that's built into some versions of Windows 7 is pretty good (eg at home I have an old USB scanner which doesn't have win 7 64 bit drivers but works fine with the 32 bit XP VM)

If you don't have the appropriate version of Windows 7 then VMWare and Virtual Box are good for setting up a VM.

For my desktop PC I have a Caddy in the hard disk bay and I swap hard disks round for my needs- I have one for Gaming, one for music editing and one for general use.

The XP partition is going to be used exculisvly for music recording with Sonar or Cubase. I would've used a virtual machine but I'm not sure if the virtual machine would handle my USB sound card, I don't want to add any factors that could add latency, plus there's a slight performance hit using a virtual machine

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Originally Posted by d-taylor

For my desktop PC I have a Caddy in the hard disk bay and I swap hard disks round for my needs- I have one for Gaming, one for music editing and one for general use.

The XP partition is going to be used exculisvly for music recording with Sonar or Cubase. I would've used a virtual machine but I'm not sure if the virtual machine would handle my USB sound card, I don't want to add any factors that could add latency, plus there's a slight performance hit using a virtual machine

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You can give USB devices over to a VM, which would allow the USB sound card to be used by the XP VM.

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Originally Posted by Arcath

You can give USB devices over to a VM, which would allow the USB sound card to be used by the XP VM.

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Is that with Windows virtual PC/XP Mode included with Windows 7? Becasue I'm fairly sure the seperate Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 download doesn't support USB, if you want to use USB sticks you have to 'map a drive' in the guest OS after installing the Virtual Machine add-ons

VirtualBox does it.