Backup Before Installing Windows 7 In Dual Boot
Jul 29, 2009
i want' to try windows 7, but i don't want to lose vista since windows 7 is just an RC and could still cause some crashes. my option is giving dual booting a try. i have read many tutorials on how to do it, and im pretty confident that i can do it. the problem is, i don't have DVD's to backup my vista, and i still dont know yet how many DVD's my files will consume if i have 50-60 GB in my drive C:i also have external DVD writer, but im not sure if that will work flawlessly since it's external.
My questions are: can i install windows 7 on a different partition without booting from DVD? (I installed my vista over XP without booting from DVD). can i install windows 7 on a different partition using a virtual drive? what are the chances that windows 7 installation will fail during installation? can i still boot vista if windows 7 installation fails? is it possible to do system restore if installation and vista won't boot? and finally, is windows 7 worth the trouble and risk of going thru all these? i will base my decisions on your answers since this is the most intellectual vista forum i've seen so far.
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Jun 1, 2009
so I have a dual booting OS with XP64 and Vista64 on 2 partitions from the same HD. I want to install XP32 instead of the XP64 on one of the partitions but the last time I did this, I lost my boot menu when I start up and it would only take me into XP. How can I avoid this problem?
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Mar 9, 2008
I have a laptop with a 320 gig hard drive divided into 4 partitions. I am dual booting Xp Professional and Vista Business 32 bit Edition. I plan on upgrading to Ultimate as soon as Microsoft ships it to me. I have 2 partitons for XP, 1 for vista, and 1 as a shared partition that has mydocuments and email settings so that both systems can access them. If I use Complete PC Backup and select all partitions will this backup everything ot a 500 gig external, including the boot records so that if I do oa complete pc restore it will restore it so that my boot menu is restoreed in the event of a hd failure? Also, when I get vista ultimate, I plan on using Bit Locker to encrypt my Vista partition. Will that affect the complete pc backup of that partition or any of the others?
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Apr 1, 2008
first of all, il explain what exactly i wanted to do with my laptop which is currently running a Vista Home Premium 32bit. I needed to install an 64bit ver of XP Pro on a 2nd partition and set it to dual boot. My laptop is a Fujitsu-Siemens and has a single WD 250GB Sata HD and my processor supports 64Bit OS. I followed the instructions on the forums on how to shrink a partition and create a new one for the second OS(XP). However, after going through the procedure i placed the XP disk in the tray and booted from it. It was loading just fine then suddenly after i press enter when i was asked to continue to install, it mentioned later that it could not detect any hard drive or that i need to disable any program or whatever. I figured maybe theres a setting in the bios but i found nothing i can do with the HD settings. Im not familiar with Vista so i need to know is there any possiblility to install the XP OS. Also, i was wondering if the manufacturer locked the HD and maybe the only way is to reformat the HD and reinstall everything.
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May 8, 2009
I want to install Windows 7 RC 64bit on my laptop as a dual boot. Do the requirements meet the minimum for 64 bit versions? I would surely like to know.
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Apr 14, 2009
I am upgrading my computer system and am planning to dual-boot Vista and Vista 64 - I have a lot of older applications which may not work well (or at all) on the 64-bit OS, but I will also be doing a fair amount of video processing, which will run much better with the larger amount of memory accessible under Vista 64. I would like a copy of Office 2007 to be accessible and usable under both OSes. Obviously, it would need to be installed separately under each one, but would it be OK to install it to the same directory (not on either boot disk) under each one, or are some different files installed under the two OSes, necessitating two completely separate install directories.
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May 9, 2009
Had vista & windows 7 dual booting & then i installed xp pro & lost my dual boot. How can i get it back?
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Mar 23, 2008
I have windows xp installed right now and I dual booted with vista by re-partitioning my hard drive. After encountering problems with vista I delted the vista partition and resized the xp partition back to it's original size. I am now stuck with the windows vista boot loader which persistantly telling me that the windows vista files are not present etc. etc. Is there any way that I can delted the vista bootloader and go back to using the xp bootloader?
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Aug 11, 2009
I have 2 SATA 200gb hard drives and one is running vista premium and the other has nothing on it. I wanted to try the windows 7 so can I just install the windows 7 on my other HD and when I shut down my PC will it ask what HD operating system do I wnat to run? Is this how it works?
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Jun 26, 2008
How do I make a dual boot drive for vista and windows 3.1?
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Apr 2, 2009
I figure that since millions of Windows 7 installations on the CPP have been made, not to mention tap build s and tech beta builds, that it is appropriate to ask this question since
a) It involves a former Vista on a dual boot
b) MSFT has seen fit to put only one NNTP public group up for Win 7 and it is an Italian one and I don't speak Italian or even drive a Ferrari or Lamborghini or Maserati in Englishd
c) Darrell Gorter who has this stuff in his blood is kind enough to frequent the setup group and share his skills.
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Mar 23, 2008
I apologize, I'm sure this has been asked a million times before, but I'm finding so much contradictory and/or outdated information that I honestly don't know what's possible at this point. I'm sure someone out there probably has a form-reply to this at this point! I blame Microsoft entirely for not making things like this at all clear (or at least not easy to find)!
Anyway, I've got Windows XP Pro (SP2) and want to purchase and install Windows Home Premium in a dual-boot configuration *without* wiping out the XP install.
1) Can I do this with an Upgrade copy of Vista, or do I need to buy a Full version?
2) What, if anything, do I need to do to ensure that XP isn't overwritten?
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May 5, 2009
I want to dual boot Vista64 and Windows 7. I have a 600GB drive with Vista and all programs. I also have a 1.5TB drive that I use for storage and a disk image of the 600GB drive. I know I need to partition the 1.5TB drive to install 7, but I've never done this before. Can I partition without having to format? If so, how? Can I use Disk Management to do this?
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Mar 25, 2008
Well, I made a huge mistake, and I am very tired at the moment, I just removed my windows XP off of the dual boot, later did I realize that my windows xp was actually the boot partition. So I tried to boot up and I got a error, so I reinstalled windows xp. But now the dual boot is gone and I have no idea how to get vista back.
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Mar 23, 2008
is it unheard of to dual-boot Vista x64 on a dual-core computer with x32 on an external drive (same software package)?
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Feb 6, 2009
I have a HP pavilion laptop which came with 64 bit vista ultimate pre-installed. I shrinked the OS partition (160 GB), created new partition (40 GB) for 64 bit windows 7 ultimate. After installation of Windows 7, I cannot see the vista ultimate boot option when I boot my PC. When I boot into Windows 7, I still can see the vista partition. But instead of C: it is now displayed as E: I used the HP Recovery Disc to repair windows vista but I can only see a blank blue screen with the mouse pointer. How can I recover the vista?
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Nov 3, 2009
When you are installing a new windows after booting from a CD, when it asks you how big in terms of bytes you want it to be, is the number originally there, the biggest it can be (my number was something like 3000000 bytes)? Also, when I look at my C drive in my compter, it says 142 GB free of of 298, which means it totals to be 340 GB, but the box the laptop came with says it has 320 GB total...could this have to do with the confusion about how many MB is in a GB? Because some people say 1024 MB in a GB and so forth. Also I notice on my dell dimension e310 There is this bar blocking a space for a driver, you can see the one for floppy disc on there, but that is blocked my a bar as well. How do you remove them, can it be done only from the inside?
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Mar 26, 2008
I have an HP 7763w PC, which came with Vista. It has that vertical bay in the tower front for a backup (or portable?) drive, that can be popped in and out easily. I really would like to have XP on my machine again, but am a little concerned about changing the main HD, or making a partition on it, fearing unforeseen problems. Can I install it on the BU drive? Or what would be a good way to be able to boot into either OS at my choice?
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Mar 23, 2008
I have an HP 7763w PC, which came with Vista. It has that vertical bay in the tower front for a backup (or portable?) drive, that can be popped in and out easily. I really would like to have XP on my machine again, but am a little concerned about changing the main HD, or making a partition on it, fearing unforeseen problems. Can I install it on the BU drive? Or what would be a good way to be able to boot into either OS at my choice?
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Oct 12, 2009
I built a new machine.Running Vista Home premium,8GB of Ram,Phenom11 3.2MHz.
I have 2 hard drives.First one portioned to C: and D:
Second HD portioned into D: and E: I have Vista on C drive.I would like to Dual Boot Vista with Windows7.
My question is do I need a Boot loader application or does vista have the ability to dual boot?
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Mar 23, 2008
I have more or less completed all the driver upgrades and windows updates but I keep getting repeated boot failures of Vista. I can always get into Safe mode but in Normal mode the boot fails just after the first spash screen at the point when the screen goes blank to be replaced by the small circular Vista logo. After 2 or 3 attempts it succeeds to load but then the problem seems to reoccur, particularly when I have been back to XP for a while.
I had a similar problem with XP but that seems to have sorted itself out. I have tired looking in the logs for faults and failures but no clues there. I am running an ASUS P5E MB with Intel Quad 6600, 4Gig RAM, GeForce 8800GT and 2x250Gig HDs.
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Mar 24, 2008
XP is on 1st primary partition [active] and is old. Vista is on 2nd Primary partition and is new. Dual boot info, I believe, is all on the XP partition. Soon I will want to go to Vista only. Do I just delete the XP partition (after imaging it, of course!) and set
Vista partition to active? (Paragon Partition Manager). Will it then automatically boot into Vista (which has no boot.ini)?
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Mar 23, 2008
I have installed Vista on my C: disk. After that I installed XP on D: disk. Now I can't boot Vista anymore.
I tried with boot.ini. I've read that there's a program called bcdedit.exe. I tried to make that one work on XP, but I failed. I don't have Vista's DVD, and I'm trying to avoid installing XP again. If there's any way around...I would be gratefull! (Is there any way I can edit bcdedit.exe in XP?)
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Mar 8, 2009
I was running dual boot fine between XP and Vista now im running both Vista it only reads my newly installed drive on boot and i have no boot options as you do in XP/Vista installs, im a newbie to dual drives and was wondering how to set it to have boot options now!
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Mar 26, 2008
I searched all over the internet for this simple (I think) problem, but I couldn't find any solutions. I have installed Vista on my C: disk. After that I installed XP on D: disk. Now I can't boot Vista anymore. I tried with boot.ini. I've read that there's a program called bcdedit.exe. I tried to make that one work on XP, but I failed.
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Sep 16, 2008
I wanted my computer do dual-boot with XP, so i made a new partition called F, and then i ran the XP CD and installed in F the CD. But now, when booting, it only shows Windows XP Professional. Have i accidentally formatted my VIsta? Because my programs from Vista are still there.
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Oct 1, 2006
I would like to dual boot im running xp pro at the moment and wanted to add vista to. But i have never tried it before
Can somone show me a easy guide to do this please i have Symantec Norton Partition Magic 8.
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Feb 22, 2009
I have Vista Home Premium on C:. There are a few programs that
won't run under Vista, and I've read that dual booting in easy under Vista.
I have a spare drive so I'm wondering, can I mount the spare drive and
install XP on it and use it to dual boot?
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Oct 23, 2007
I first had Windows Vista installed on my "C:/" disk. After that I immediately installed Windows XP on my "F:/" disk. Remember that "F:/" is an whole other drive then the "C:/" drive! So all this went well without trouble. But then, as soon as I rebooted my PC I couldn't boot into Windows Vista and only Windows XP worked. Guess what; The bootsector of Windows Vista was either damaged or missing, I restored it using the 'restore-bootfiles' function from the Windows Vista DVD.
After doing so, I restarted my PC again, now Windows Vista worked fine but Windows XP didn't. The reason for this is kinda logical, Windows Vista uses another BootLoader than Windows XP does. The BootLoader of Windows Vista recognizes Windows XP but that's not the same the other way around. So basically it should work with the needed configuration. For (*trying to set up*) setting up a Dual Boot I used EasyBCD 1.7, but it simply isn't working. I made the following entries:
There are a total of 5 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Microsoft Windows Vista....
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Jun 30, 2008
From what I am told Vista Ultimate's retail packages come with both 32 and 64 bit in the box. Is it possible to have these concurrently installed as a dual boot, or would they conflict with eachother. What if I were do do it on separate physical drives, disconnecting the other one before each install so that they don't detect eachother?
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Jul 16, 2006
im trying to dual boot windows xp and windows vista when i start up my computer there was a screen that asked which OS i wanted to run and i had 2 options "Earlier Version of Windows" (WIndows XP) and "Microsoft Windows" (Windows Vista) But now my computer boots directly to vista without even asking me which OS i wanted to run. People are saying that Vista overwrote my MBR (master boot record) and now i have to modify the bcdedit.
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