Dual boot questions

[krizrox]

I want to create a dual-boot system from two hard drives. One had windows 7 64 already preinstalled on it and the other HD has Windows XP preinstalled. Is it possible to install one drive as Drive 0 and the other drive as Drive 1 and then simply create a dual-boot situation where I can choose between one or the other partition/drive when the PC boots? Does EasyBCD provide for that? Or do I need something special to make that happen? Thanks!

[jksuperstar]

I think it is completely possible. I just added a second boot option to my existing win7pro_x64 (adding win7pro_x86), and it was painless. I didn't do it with EasyBCD, just through the windows installer, which is a dumb program (it detects any other windows boot as "Win"...not windows 7, or XP, etc).

I would run EasyBCD, and see what the options are, you can always choose to make no changes!

[krizrox]

Well, that's a slightly different scenario. I bought an SSD drive and loaded Win 7 64 on it but I'd like to keep my originial HD with WIN XP 32 as a secondary in case I want to use some of my older software. I know I can do fresh reinstall but if I don't have to ...

Also I dont want to screw up the boot manager from either drive in the process in case I want to undo any of this.

[garyb]

how about a harddrive caddy?

insert the win7 caddy when you want win7 and the xp caddy for xp. you can't hotswap, but with a dual boot, you'd need to reboot anyway. doing it with caddies will keep you from having strange problems related to drive name. both drives in a dual boot can't be called C:, so one or the other install would be on a weirdly named drive, ie D: or E:. also, programs wouldn't find files in the other os's files, etc...

[krizrox]

Yeah I see how that could be a problem with the drive letters and all. The drive caddy idea has merit but probably more trouble then it's worth for me personally. I'll probably just wipe the drive and do a fresh install and let the OS's create their own boot manager. That's how I'm doing it now with two Win XP installs - one for general purpose the other for DAW work.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[dante]

In my dual boot scenario

http://www.hitfoundry.com/issue_20/w8_mast.htm

Whichever O/S I boot becomes Drive C and the other becomes Drive D.

They are 2 partitions of same physical drive.

[jksuperstar]

+1, that's how my dual boot works also. Then I have a separate HDD for samples, recordings, etc.

[garyb]

if you think a caddy is harder, then stay away from dual boot. nothing can be easier than sliding a drive in and out. jmho.

[Ricardo]

Another +1 to add to Dante and JK. However the caddy idea sounds more foolproof. Occasionally I have experienced cross talk, i.e. updates and programs trying to install on to both OS, causing performance problems on the audio OS. Might look into it.

[w_ellis]

FWIW, I just added an XP install to my setup, so I can now boot into Windows 7, 8 and XP, each installed on separate hard-drives. I used EasyBCD to set up the booting (not necessary if you're just booting later versions of Windows) and all worked pretty much straight away.

The only complexity was in the fact that Windows 7 and 8 were accessing their hard drives in AHCI mode, not IDE. That meant that I had to switch to IDE mode (in the BIOS) to install XP, install the AHCI drivers for my motherboard in XP and then switch back to AHCI mode.

For anyone else that might want to do this, I followed the guide here: https://neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/dual- ... ng-second/

P.S. EasyBCD is free for non-commercial use, as is iReboot, which is my new favourite app