Windows 7 And Windows 8 Dual Booting Then Adding Linux?
Feb 4, 2013
My OS of choice back then was MS Windows, however after Windows XP I moved to OSX. About two years ago I knew I needed to get back involved with Windows and bought my Lenovo Laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium. I then installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a different partition and upgraded to Windows 8 Pro when it became available. I am now looking to install a distro of Linux and can't seem to find any information of doing so. I don't know which Windows partition it would be best to install it on 7 or 8. Also I understand that Ubuntu have a Windows Installer wubi, but I have heard horror stories after the installation. My main fear is losing Windows 7 or 8 and if the entire process is too risky I'll just leave it altogether. So I guess my question is has anyone installed a Linux distro on a PC which originally came pre installed with Windows 7 and then added Windows 8 to a partition?
I bought each of my twin sons a Dell Inspiron 15R. As teenage boys do, they really mucked them up with every kind of virus and x-ware out there. After not being completely successful cleaning them up with various anti-what-ever programs, I decided to reformat and do a clean install. Problem is, Dell no longer furnishes a hard copy of the OS that was installed at factory. Apparently, they have partitioned the hard drive and installed all original software in that partition, and provided a PC Restore program that will access all software and re-set-up the computer to the state is was when purchased. After doing this, everything worked fine as it claimed it would. Personally, I find it to be the best thing that Dell has done with MS in years.
My question is this...Can I dual boot this set-up with Linux (which I use exclusively, and my son wants to learn), or will this partition that Dell is now using cause me real problems in the case that I may need to perform a future PC Restore?
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.
Windows 7 not booting! I have a Medion Laptop and it froze so I forced it off. Now when I load it in any mode (safe mode freezes after avg file) It will go to a black screen or a 0xc0000009 I/O error message. I've run it in start up repair and there aren't any system restore points available and start up repair took 17 hours before I decided to turn it off! My hardware doesn't make any strange sounds and my bios recognises my Hard Drive. Luckily, there's nothing important on the laptop so I don't mind if we have to reset it to factory settings as I have the Windows 7 installation disc as well!
I was trying to install a ubuntu distribution to my primary hard drive (along side Windows 7) and at 99% of copying files the setup reported there was not sufficient memory to install backtrack. I cannot boot back into windows 7 as the computer resets before getting past the boot screen (shows 'starting windows' as normal then the screen blacks and takes me back to BIOS). this process loops unless I select windows repair option, which does not fix the problem. The Backtrack live CD won't let me delete the new, half-installed partition, so therefore I cannot change the windows partition back to it's usual (small) size of 55GB.
I would like to learn some linux and for that i need a secondary OS, I want to keep my Internal as my Windows 7 drive and that has boot priority but i want the linux to run from partition 2 (or 1) on an external HDD
I want to install linux along with windows 7 on my Dell studio 15. For this as i have read on the threads that C: drive needs to be shrunk as it is the active partition . And for linux at least 10 GB should be kept as unallocated space . But when i tried to shrink my C: drive then the available space for shrinking is shown to be just 39 MB which is highly insufficient. how to increase this size and install linux on my PC .
I have been using Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, since the last time I visited the forums but now I want to dual boot with Windows 7. So, I have just Mint 8 (based on Ubuntu 9.10) installed on my laptop (nothing else), and I if I wanted to dual boot with Windows 7, how would I do it? I know I could use VirtualBox to run Windows 7 but I want to dual-boot.
This week, I encountered the following strange problem for which I haven't found a final solution so far, though I have found some bandaids. But having a complete solution -or at least a reason why this problem occurs- would be great:I have a working installation of Windows 7 Professional x64 in UEFI mode. The main disk, SSD #1, contains the following partitions (using GPT): ESP, MSR, system, data. An additional disk, HD #2, with a single data partition (using MBR) is also attached to the system. With this setup, everything works fine.Now, after adding another disk, HD #3, to the system -my old system disk (bootable, using MBR, one active primary partition and an extend partition with three logical disks)- Windows will no longer boots completely: The boot process begins, the Windows logo is shown. Then, a message is shown in text mode "Windows is loading files" with a loading bar. After a while the boot process stops and I am dropped into the EFI shell. After removing the offending HD #3, Windows boots normally again.
I tried removing HD #2 and only attaching HD #3 together with SSD #1, but this yielded the same problem. Using SSD #1 by itself works fine though. Booting from a Linux live-cd works without problems. All disks and partitions are found and can be mounted. There, I erased the disk signature from the offending HD #3 and now Windows was able to boot and also found all disks and partitions correctly. But after a reboot the same problem reappeared
I'm using multiple hard drives to install both fedora and Windows 7. I've followed this online tutorial exactly: Dual-booting Fedora 14 and Windows 7 on a computer with 2 hard drives
The problem I seem to be facing is on the "Add a new Entry Step". His secondary OS partition has a drive letter assigned to it and I do not. I've gone into computer management and have tried to assign a drive letter to either of my secondary OS's hard drive partitions and it will not let me.
All I need is the boot loader to link to my second hard drive when the second option (OS) is chosen.
I set it up so that I could access my E: drive from either the windows or ubuntu operating system. It has worked perfectly so far (about 6 months). But, here is the problem:For some reason as the share drive (my E: drive / sda3) grows Windows thinks that the windows system drive (sda2/c:drive) is also growing. So that now I have a low storage warning stating that there is only 8.76 GB of free space left on my 99 GB C: drive. When, in reality, there should be about 77 GB of free space. I've made hidden files/folders viewable and downloaded treesizefree so I know what should be on the drive. The Treesizefree output shows the expected 22 GB of space but also shows only 9 GB of free space. So, the missing space is nearly exactly the size of my shared drive (sda3/E:drive). So somehow, I think the windows OS is double counting my shared E: drive against my C: drive.
I would like to install Linux Ubuntu on my laptop alongside Windows using dual boot. However, people keep telling me that it is not a good idea this to be done on a laptop because of driver comparability and stuff like that. So is it OK if dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on a laptop or it is a terrible idea?
This computer orignially had Windows 7 installed on it. I have just now installed XP on a second partition. I was expecting bootmanager to come up every time I booted, asking for either XP or 7. To my suprise, it boots straight onto Windows XP. how to modify msconfig (via XP) to add the W7 boot?
I have XP and considering having a dual booting system. I'm a bit confused as to whether I need an upgrade version of Windows 7 or a "full version," since they will be on different drives. I'm further confused having read that when up upgrading from XP to W7 using upgrade software, its necessary to do a clean install. Isn't a clean install the same as installing from scratch and therefor a full version of W7 is required?
I currently have Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit installed on my computer on a SSD drive, and I'm trying to install Windows Server 2003 on a second hard drive (regular SATA II HDD).When I boot with the Windows Server 2003 CD, everything seems to be fine... it pops-up the usual blue screen and the drivers are loading, but once the drivers are done loading, I get this error message:"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps:Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.
why this message pops-up and prevents me from installing Windows server 2003? Is it possible to have a dual boot with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2003?
I'm considering buying an XP installation CD/license. Are these still available? And if so, what's the price? And also, how would I go on about dual booting? I heard you have to shrink your partition to fit the XP installation on (because I only have one hard drive). Is there a tutorial that tells you? Sorry if this all sounds a bit newbish, but I'm not too experienced with this part of computing even though I reformatted my PC about 3 times.
Just what the title says, how do I set up dual booting between Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and Windows XP MCE 32 bit, with both OSes already installed on two separate HDDs. It has been suggested that I use EasyBCD to add the XP MCE entries to the Windows 7 boot menu. It has also been suggested that when I want to boot into the XP MCE drive, that I change the boot order in the BIOS. Would this still screw up the MBR for Windows 7?
Is it possible to dual boot Windows 7 Pro, one partition being a 32 bit system, and one being a 64 bit? I have a program that just won't run on 64 bit, and my processor doesn't allow for Virtual PC, so can I have a separate partition with 32 bit Windows 7 Pro running?
How do i uninstall any linux distro after successfully installing both windows and linux.i dont want to lose my MBR. [or] will it (Windows) rewrite it again.i am a bit scared to do it myself as i was going to do a secure deletion of the partition.
i want to dual boot Linux and windows 7 (whats already installed )
i have 2 hdd one with windows 7 installed on(c drive) and drivers etc . and on my second one i have my media .
so my question is if i make a partition on my c drive and install Linux as well will i still be able to access my media on the second hard disk if i boot Linux or windows 7 .
I was wondering if there are any issue with dual booting Windows 7 pro 64 bit on an internal SSD drive. I currently have Windows 7 pro 64 bit on a 500gb 7200 hard drive plus a backup 1 TB 7200 rpm drive; but I wanted the speed I would get by installing win7 pro 64bit on a 250gb SSD drive. I would basically only install specific essential software like Adobe Premeire Pro and Photoshop, among others. I originally was going to use the SDD drive as a scratch disc but after reading, I thought it might be better to just install Win7 on the SSD drive. This way I could also experiment with what would be the best configuration. I still get confused about scratch disc and how useful they are if you have plenty of memory.
As an alternative to re-installing all my programmes etc. I have recently considered installing Windows 7.0 on one of my three harddrives. I understand that this is perfectly feasible, however, my main aim is to be able to address more ram, hence W 7.0 64 bit. Would Vista 32 still run happily with 8GB or more of memory in the mobo?The hd is 500 Gig.
I have Windows 7 64-bit and I want to install Windows XP 32-bit for extra cross-compatibility. I know 32 bit apps can work in 64 bit but I also need my printers and other devices working.
I need help with a guide to dual-boot operating systems but I can't find a guide that includes Windows 7 as the first operating system. Could anybody help me by pointing me in the right direction?
This is what I am attempting...I want some time to learn Win 7's ins and outs...before committing to it. I know how to dual boot...don't want that. If I set up like this image, will I be able to use the F8 boot menu to choose the HDD I wish to boot from...or will I just have to disconnect the XP drives and only connect the Win 7 drive. I want to keep the MBR's totally separate.
I see THREE possibilities:
1. F8 will work and just not SEE the other Windows install...which is fine.
2. F8 will work and Win 7 will try to take over all three drives.
3. F8 will work, but when booted to the Win 7 HDD, will wreak havoc with the drivers, IF it sees the other install.
I have been dual booting XP Pro 32-bit and Vista Ultimate 64-bit for some time now but haven't really found a good way to delete XP Pro (my first installed os) leaving my Vista os able to boot up normally. I have scoured the forums and was about to delete a lot of files from the XP partition but leaving the loader files and root files alone. This would enable me to free up a lot of drive space. Currently the 2 os's reside on a RAID setup one partition for XP and another for Vista.
OK so I have found the Windows 7 forums and thinks that it would be good idea to replace XP with Windows 7 but the upgrade options for the Beta do not allow upgrade to Windows 7 from XP.
If I upgraded XP to Vista 32-bit what would happen to my boot files etc etc and could I then further upgrade to Windows 7 leaving that and Vista 64-bit dual booting together?
Or is this a complicated way to do things?
What I really want to do is delete XP Pro - I am rather fond of Vista now and seems very stable. But I do not want to be faced with boot problems after deleting.
I currently have installed on both os's, Acronis's OS Selector and BCD Edit.
I really need a very accurate method rather than a theoretical answer - someone who has done this successfully please. I have spent too long wading through forums looking for a way of successfully deleting XP and receiving maybe this will work or maybe that type of answers.
i've got a macbook running Windows 7, and i want to dualboot it and get osx back on there. should be easy, osx on a macbook, right? **** me.
i did a bit of homework first, and reviewed what other people have done for dualbooting, but all of the threads are ancient and address different specific issues so here are the steps i went through:
-created a second partition in Windows 7, ntfs, made it active
-rebooted with an authentic osx snow leopard disc
-osx installation startup began
-went into disk utility to format it to "journalled" and get this error: "Volume Erase failed with the error: Could not modify partition map"
it won't let you install until the disk is formatted correctly..
I've Linux Debian installed at my workstation. We are not allowed to remove it. But I would like to make the system dual-boot. Debian Lenny is already installed, How can I safely install Win7RC along with the Debian without losing any of the files/system/partition etc.
I installed Fedora on my system preinstalled with windows 7. Now during booting Windows 7 is not appearing. It is only showing Fedora. But it should show both the os and allow us to choose.
My laptop is currently dual booting Ubuntu 11.04 and windows 7. Recently windows has been taking forever to boot up (at least 2 - 4 minutes), it runs perfectly fine when booted. I stuck in the CD to see if there was any start up errors but I cannot seem to access that due to the grub menu. Is there anyway to fix this issue?
