Dual Boot (XP / Windows 7) Data Sharing
Apr 22, 2011
My computer is set up to dual boot WinXP and Windows 7, mostly for gaming compatibility purposes, but I love both OS equally to be honest. I'm trying to make both operating systems basically store and retrieve as much data from the same places as possible without destroying anything. For example, this is what I did so far...
- All drive letters are identical in both OS, to ensure maximum compatibility if running the same program on either OS.
- I have a shared Program Files folder which contains any programs that both OS can run and aren't entirely dependent on the correct registry keys on my "shared" hard drive, separate from my dual partitioned with the operating systems. Also on this drive is where I install my games and just about anything else both OS will use.
- Both OS use most of the same User's folder. I consider 7 my 'main OS', so my XP installation uses Windows 7's Documents, Music, Downloads, Favorites, and Videos folder, as well as a couple other of the personal settings folder. This works great for my games, both OS share most of my save game files so I can load a game in either OS and there's my progress.
So far everything is working great, but I want to take one final leap and I'm not sure of the effect, mostly because I'm not educated enough about program application data and what kinds of settings they store. Programs seem to store personal data in folders known as "Application Data" in XP and "AppData" in 7. From my understanding, this is pretty much how it goes... (XP Folder then Windows 7 Equivalent)
x:Documents and SettingsidApplication Data == x:UsersidAppDataRoaming
and
x:Documents and SettingsidLocal SettingsApplication Data == x:UsersidAppDataLocal
I know how to change where XP stores application data via the registry, what I'm wondering is will there be some kind of negative effect in doing so? Will it mess up my program data? This would be the last thing I can think of doing to minimize the amount of wasteful data stored between my operating systems. From what I'm seeing the programs I happened to install on both have exactly the same AppData in both folders.
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Dec 6, 2012
I have a system with 3 drives disk0, disk1, and disk2.What I'd ultimately like to do is install Windows 7 on disk0 and install Linux on disk1. Then I want to have disk2 split into 2 partitions(part0, part1) for programs and other misc install files.However I don't want disk1 and disk2part1 to be visible while using disk0 and disk2part0 and vice versa.Is there any way to make this possible?
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Sep 12, 2011
i have a new work laptop with xp sp3 on it. I want to install w7 64 bit as a dual boot, but only have 1 physical drive. i cannot remove my current installation as it is pre-build from work, but can partition the drive etc. However on trying to install w7 64 bit I get a message saying cannot install windows 7 on efi drive with mbr, not gpt. Can I do what I want without screwing up my xp installation?
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Feb 4, 2011
dual booting windows 7 home premium x64 with linux fedora 14 on dual independantly dedicated drives. i am a college student with moderate computer (windows) knowledge but am doing software development and would like to play around with some linux for a class. i have no prior experience with linux and have minimal knowledge of operation. i am currently running windows 7 and would like to keep it as my primary os. i do not wish to share media files across drives or os's, windows does that just fine as is and i dont want to get into a third drive. my current drive is a 1tb wd black caviar hdd. it is also currently 2/3rds full and the desktop is about 6 months old so i would rather not partition the drive for a dual boot. i would think that there are some other advantages for the os's operating independantly off their own drives other than if one hdd dies i should still have the other with its os still ok. i have read some topics about RAID configs with dual boot setups with dual drives like this but am not very familiar with RAID. is there a RAID config that would be beneficial in this situation? i currently do not have a RAID card. my tower internals are not very accessible and i dont like the idea of disconnecting drives depending on which os i want to operate.
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Jul 23, 2012
So currently I have Windows Xp and Windows 7 /32bit installed. Windows XP on C Drive and Windows 7 on D.I would like to install Windows 7 /64 bit over windows XP so I can use more than 4G Ram. So I would have both 32 and 64 bit windows on the same PC. I have few questions: Can I somehow upgrade from XP to 7 without losing data and files? Will I still be able to go on the Windows 7 /32Bit?
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Aug 18, 2012
So I've been using my 64GB ssd as my windows 7 boot drive and i have a 1TB hdd as my data drive. Recently the my computer has begun to freeze up with errors like "explorer.exe" has stopped responding or "windows" has stopped responding and half of the time when i try to boot it says it cant find windows. This has lead me to believe that my ssd is dying despite being only a year old. I need to RMA my ssd but to do that i would be losing my boot drive for weeks. So I thought id try to create a system image so that i can simply put my boot drive on my hdd, but when i try to create the image it says that the image would be 711GB because its including all of my hdd (which contains all my user libraries and downloads). My question is: how do I make windows stop thinking that my hdd is a system drive so that I can create a reasonably sized image, or more generally: how can i easily move my boot drive to my hdd? Also, I've read some posts about using "easyBCD" to accomplish the latter but I'm not sure that's exactly what i need in this situation.
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Nov 27, 2011
When building my Hifi mancave, I was smart enough to wire it for Cat6, etc, but not smart enough to put a few lines of cat 6 into my HTPC jack. So I only have 1 cat6 line into my computer area. My new receiver (Onkyo TX-NR809) has a ethernet port in it, which enables internet radio, media sharing, playing, firmware updating, etc. Being a techy guy I got another netcard and put it in my computer and I want to share internet to the receiver via LAN2.
I've been scouring the internet trying to figure out how to do this with Windows 7x64 to whatever system (probably linux based?). I've seen how to do it with Windows 7&XP, XP&XP, Windows 7&7 linux & Windows, and they all use some sort of "brige internet connection" or something like that, which doesn't apply to my situation. Will someone just tell me what IP stuffs to use for the following:
[code]...
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Nov 18, 2009
I have 2 pcs on a LAN with a 100mbps switch, and they are also directly connected via Gigabit crossover. When both ran XP, I could uncheck "File and Printer Sharing" on each 100mbps connection, and they used only the direct crossover at 1gbps.
Now, with Windows 7 on one and XP on the other, copying files uses the switch by default, even with "File and Printer Sharing" unchecked. This is ridiculous. It should be able to see that there's a wide open connection that's ten times faster sitting completely idle. I even think that the "Local Area Network 2", not the primary.
Any ideas?
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Nov 12, 2009
As currently configured, XP is on drive C:, Win 7 was added to drive E:, and the system is currently run as a dual boot. Attempting to boot without the XP drive present will yield a "NTLDR is missing" error very early in the boot process.
I have already tried the following:
(1) I moved the hidden Windows Boot Manager files (bootmgr as well as the associated Boot folder) from the XP drive root to the Win 7 drive root.
(2) After physically removing the XP drive, I rebooted to the Win 7 installation DVD, and used the "Repair Your Computer" option to pull up the "Recovery Tools". Then, using the command prompt utility, ...
(3) I attempted to write a new boot sector to the Windows 7 disk using the command: Bootrec /fixboot, - that yields an error though. The Bootrec /fixmbr claimed success, but ultimately did not make Win 7 drive bootable.
I had to reconnect drive C: just to boot into Win 7 again to write this. I do have files backed up, but to format and reinstall files would take many hours beyond just the time to transfer 400 GB of data, since I have dozens of purchased applications that need to be freshly reinstalled and validated as well. Basically I want my E: drive now to be my boot drive while the C: drive is reformatted and used for general storage.
Any idea how to make my Win 7 drive bootable? Do I need a partition program that is more adept at creating a viable boot sector, or is that even the problem?
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Oct 14, 2009
I installed Windows 7 on a partitioned harddrive with vista on the other half. After the installation i have my boot menu with:Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows vista still works but when i try and load windows 7 i get a boot error message
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Aug 8, 2012
I have dual boot with Xp and windows 7.when i log into my Xp all the restore points being deleted from windows 7.when i check the disk management information in 7 it shows windows 7 create a logical drive with my Xp primary drive.even i am hide the drive from both windows means Xp drive from windows 7 and vice verse.So i like to unmount or remove the drive partition of windows 7 from Xp and Xp primary from windows 7.So that they dont affect each others system files with being deleted the partitions.
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Apr 6, 2012
I installed opensuse 12.1 on dual boot along with my other windows 7 installation. Installation of opensuse is successful and i can use it. But when I tried to use windows 7 on grub, it says bootmgr is missing. I've already encountered this problem a long time ago so i tried to use bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot in the recovery console in the windows 7 DVD. Rebuildbcd and fixboot did not work and it said something like it cannot find my windows installation. I also tried bootrec /scanos, it returned a windows installation on D:\Windows but my windows is in drive C. I think this has something to do with me messing up the active partition in disk management a month ago but i already fixed it by setting the active partition to the system reserved partition. Only fixmbr is successful, but now i can't boot on any OS because it says: Missing operating system.I also tried bcdboot C:\Windows but it failed with a message that goes like: Failure when attempting to copy boot information..
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Dec 3, 2010
I can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
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Mar 11, 2009
How to Change the OS Name in Windows Boot Manager ?
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Aug 6, 2012
I have installed a year before UBUNTU on my pc with dual boot (i.e. use either window 7 or ubuntu).the NTFS partition that contains the UBUNTU was corrupted and i wanted to take the dual boot from my PC. I used the instructions from the web site: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...t-environment/but the disk management tool would not let me delete the NTFS partition.Could any one help me delete the NTFS partition and use just windows 7 as the only boot. step by step help would be great.
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Feb 17, 2009
I got windows 7 running fine for a while now and ever since my XP did not boot anymore.I was not worried to much about it since i did not need it at the time.But now i really REALY need it,See i got all my Cubase projects in there and my cubase plug-ins al setup in XP and i need to get to the projects?At first it did not do anything and using easyBCD did not help either.I cpoied ntldr and detect to the root of C: wich contains my XP and now it shows the bootscreen but hangs on a black screen.The thing is right before the bootscreen shows i see the text" invalid boot.ini" flashing by very quick.I am able to enter that winXP install in safe mode and i tried safe/vga mode as well wich works but thats all.
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Nov 9, 2012
I have a laptop I bought a year ago on which a created a dual boot Win 7 (32bit)/Win XP SP3 install, each on a separate partition. It was my first Win 7/XP dual boot install, and my first personal system that I allowed to have a Win 7 install on it at all, so although I have plenty of experience working on pretty much every previous version of Windows, I have very little experience with Win 7 and dual boot configs.
Today about 2 hours ago my audio spontaneously stopped worked for no good reason, so after shutting down each program to see if that cured it (which it didn't), I restarted the system. Out of the blue, for the first time I've ever experienced it, I received the msg "MBR Error 1" - Press any key to boot from floppy. I don't have a floppy of course on my laptop, and if I press any key I simply get the same msg. I turned the system off for a few minutes to make sure it was a good cold boot, but every time I still get the same msg. I tried switching the BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI (IDE is required for XP to boot, AHCI required for Win 7), but I still get the same error msg before I'm even prompted with the OS boot selection, so it made no difference of course.
I looked up this issue and found various suggestions, but none of the ones I found took into consideration a dual boot config., they were all Win 7 specific solutions. I don't what to try and repair the MBR only to have it screw up my dual boot config and be unable to access XP, which is what I use almost exclusively, nor do i want to lose access to Win 7 if at all possible.
I had a backup HD of my complete system that I saved several months ago when I upgraded my HD, and I periodically refresh the most important files on it, so I'm currently running on the laptop in question using my old HD, and it's working just fine. Worst case I can just clone my old HD to my newer HD that's screwed up, but I'll still lose a lot of changes I've made to the OS since I upgraded the HD and have to reinstall and config a number of programs, so that's my last option. I'll also have to back up about 200GB of data from the newer HD which is much larger than my old HD, and then restore it back after the clone, something that will take a lot of time and unncessary effort if I can just fix the MBR.
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Mar 10, 2012
I had Win XP on 1 HDD & installed Win 7 on a different HDD. I think I accidentally did a dual boot install because Win 7 won't boot without the the XP disk connected to the motherboard.
That was fine until my XP drive died yesterday. Now Win 7 won't boot. The first time I tried to repair, Win 7 was not even seen. so I booted into diskpart and made the partition active. Now it could be seen as an OS.
Then I did a startup repair. It did whatever it does & when it was finished I restarted the pc but it didn't boot I went back to diskpart and confirmed the partition was active. I went back startup repair and tried again.
This time it said it could not detect a problem, but it still will not boot. What else can I do? My pc is homebuilt. Right now I have the 1 sata drive, 2.53 ghz cpu, 4gb ram, onboard video & sound
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Jan 2, 2010
I have Win XP 32 bit on my old drive. I buy Win 7 full retail and a new HD. I set bios to boot from cd etc. Win 7 starts up. It shows the 2 drives, so I select new drive...no problems. It starts install. I leave it to do its stuff.When I come back its up and all ok.I dint get any option to boot from XP. The drive was listed as "SYSTEM" but not old Windows or anything.
Also ASUS chipset drivers dont work and they were listed as 7 drivers.I tried Vista drivers but it normally shuts down and restarts. Nothing.
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Dec 8, 2010
I installed Windows 7 32bt profesional on the D: partition on an XP machine (C. Dual boot worked fine, but since I had to reinstall XP I have lost the option to change partitions at boot.I want XP to be the default but with Win 7 to an option at boot.My boot.ini is currently:[CODE]
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Jan 15, 2013
had a few problems dual booting and managed to get every thing fine. Installed easyBCD and clicked install to the wrong partitionNow when i boot after the bios it appears "windows failed to start, a recent hardware change might be the problem." Offers solutions to boot from CD which i have but wont boot. Will just appear the same screen.file:\boot\bcdinfo the windows boot configuration data file does not contain a valid OSDell inspiron 1720
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Jan 5, 2012
How do I set up a Windows 7 System with a SSD boot drive but with all User, Data & Programs (including Games) "Automatically" installing to and run from, an internal SATA Hard Drive, that preferably is labeled "C" drive or get as close to that as possible?!
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Oct 25, 2012
I was trying to get my laptop to boot into safe mode to get rid of a file. I went to msconfig and picked Safe Boot, after I restarted my laptop, I got the message:Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2. Choose your language settings, and then click "Next."
3. Click "Repair your computer."
If you do not have the disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.File: BootBCD Status: 0xc0000034 Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information.When I hit enter, it just restarts my laptop and brings me to the same screen. My laptop did not come with a installation disc.. The only thing I did was change a setting which I thought was going to boot me into safemode in msconfig.
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Oct 30, 2009
I have XP (x86) installed on one partition.
Last night I installed Windows 7 (x64) on a separate partition.
Anytime I had tried this in the past, using Vista, it always detected the Windows XP partition, and gave me a boot menu with "Earlier Version of Windows" option to boot to.
This is not so with Windows 7.
How can I get the boot menu to show both options, to boot to XP or to Windows 7?
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Feb 17, 2012
I tried to install new updates of Ableton live and the machine crashed badly... and since them it has really gone a bit wonky. When I press the on button to boot up the laptop I get the following message.The Windows Boot Configuration Data (BCD) Store file contains some invalid information.[CODE]I have a back up on another external drive ..... plus I have made a repair disk and so on when I first got the machine.
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Mar 2, 2012
One of my friends has a Windows 7 computer, but suddenly it could not start,I got an error like this
File: BootBCD
Status: 0xc0000098
Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file does not contain a valid OS entry
And I ran a Code: chkdsk c: /f /r followed by a Code: Bootrec /RebuildBcd , where it asked me, if I want to add the entry to the BCD store, and of course I answered yes Afterwards I rebooted the computer, but it came up with a blank screen. I then tried to restart the computer and it keeps coming up with a blank screen. I tried to repair using the Windows 7 - cd's repair, but with no succes. It found the Windows 7 Home Professionel, but when I tried to repair it, it says, that it could not find the OS (something like noOSInstalled). I then came into cmd again, and tried first with Code: BootRec , but it could not find the OS.Now I set it to run Code: chkdsk over the night, but what can I do, if I comes up with the blank screen again? Do I have to reinstall the computer, or are there other solutions?
CHKDSK found ad sectors in the following files Code: WindowsassemblyNATIVE~1.303PRESEN~1FFB7C7~1PRESEN~1.DLL
WindowsassemblyNATIVE~2.303SYSTEM~3.SER559EBA~1SYSTEM~1.DLL If this indicates something
Maybe I have to try with F8, when I restarts the computer for the first time after running the Code: BootRec .
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Aug 31, 2012
windows boot configuration data file does not contain a valid OS entry (0xc0000098)Trying to fix my aunts laptop (Toshiba satellite/windows 7). Tried a recovery disc, which was painfully slow but no joy.
[code]....
I did the diskpart thing in command prompt:
vol 0= E dvd rom
vol 1= C 100mb partition (active)
vol 2= D 232gb partition
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Sep 24, 2009
I was having win 7 RTM and i tried to installl OSx86 in second hard disk
after few failure i successfully installed OSx86 in my secondary had disk now the problem is that i cant boot win 7
i changed boot order i tried windows 7 disk repair
but both failed
im getting some Boot mldr missing...
Actually even OSx86 is not booting i get OSx86 boot screen with two hard disk to select if i select windows disk it still says the same Boot mldr missing.
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Aug 27, 2009
I setup an XP/Windows 7 dual boot on two drives. Currently C: Windows 7, D:XP
Love Windows 7 and now I'm ready to convert to single boot Windows 7.
I'm not real savy re. bcdedit so will need very detailed instructions
I did find the command line in Windows 7 by going through accessories but I'm scared to go further without help.
Eventually I want to clean up the D:xp and use it for storage etc.
I'm guessing this procedure may have already be written up but I can't seem to find it.
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May 19, 2011
I wanted to dual boot Mac OS with my Windows 7 but everything I do it comes wrong, simply doesn't work. I tried dual boot with iatkos v1.0i, iatkos s3, iatkos v7 but still nothing.
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May 20, 2010
i have a hard disk 500gb and i made three partitions.the 1st partition i installed windows 7 first.what i did today?i wanted to install windows xp to the 2nd partition.i installed and now that is the biggest problem.i cant in to windows 7 anymore.when i turn on my pc it has only windows xp.it hasnt dual boot to choose what operation system i want to in.so what to do?i want windows 7 and xp with dual boot to choose
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