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Dual Booting?

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4 replies

by dinkey

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I know this is probably a stupid question but I have a friend that two hard drives in his PC. On the one drive he wants to have his Win XP Pro. On the other Win 7 Pro. But his question, that I'm not sure how to answer, is if he's all ready booted into win xp can he somehow press a button or key and go to win 7 or the other way around. He says that a long time ago he was able to do this with 98se and xp. but I've not done anything like this before and was wondering if it was possible or not.

4 replies

by hal 9000

Then reboot the machine into the other OS.

If they want to switch from one OS to the Other without rebooting they need to run the second OS as a Virtual Machine through the XP Mode in 7 Pro or something like Virtual Machine which is a third party application.

With Dual Booting XP & 7 Install 7 first then install XP to the Other drive and follow the prompts. It's really quite simple. ;)

Col

by robo_dev

this lets you choose the OS at boot time.

Overall multi-OS booting is a bad idea likely to break and cause heartburn, but it can be done.

it's also possible to go into the PC BIOS and set one drive or the other as the primary boot device, but this is easy to get wrong, so either nothing at all boots, or it only boots one OS, etc.

I would buy a removable SATA drive sled, and plug in the drive/OS you want to run

by royinforest

While you can use one Windows system to boot another, they may not always play nicely together. Windows 8 (for example) will modify the boot record for the other O/S so it can boot it. This can prevent you booting the target system WITHOUT using Windows 8, even if the two systems are on separate hard drives. A better solution is to use GAG (free download from Sourceforge.net) which lets you have several bootable systems and gives you a menu to choose from. It doesn't make any changes to the systems it boots. Also it doesn't restrict you to only Windows systems. Mix Windows and Linux at will.

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