Dual Boot XP and 7 on Seperate Disks?

Terrier_Jimlad · 17 Jul 2009 at 20:55

Current setup is Windows 7 (rc7100 64bit) installed on my Falcon SSD and would like to stick another smaller disk in to install XP so I can play some games that I cant get to work in Win7 ... Is there anyway to create like a custom boot menu to select which drive to choose rather than having to go in to bios and changing the boot priority from my ssd to the other disk?

Anyone attempted it before?

Dano · 17 Jul 2009 at 21:10

Motherboard not offer a F12 (or similar) boot device option shortcut?

robinbredin · 17 Jul 2009 at 21:38

Also easybcd will not offer it either

flying grouse · 18 Jul 2009 at 20:02

easiest way would have been to install XP on a disk first, so the boot order is XP first. and then install windows 7 onto the SSD.

at the moment Win 7 doesn't recognise the existence of XP

then you will get the option to choose boot selection

Terrier_Jimlad · 18 Jul 2009 at 23:56

Success!!! .... Thought i'd share my dealings with what I did to get 7 and XP booting together on 2 different disks:

1) Unplugged my Windows7 disk
2) Put in spare 80gb disk, changed HDD priority in BIOS, and installed Windows XP x64 on it
3) Put my Windows 7 disk back in and changed HDD priority in BIOS back to my Windows 7 disk
4) Booted up to Windows 7, loaded EasyBC, added an entry for Windows XP
5) Went in to Change Settings > Entry Based Settings > and change the disk from C: to F: for Windows XP entry
6) Rebooted and walla!

Got a nice little menu that appears after BIOS screen asking for Windows 7 or Windows XP x64 and both work like a charm! Also changed the boot time wait from 30 secs to 5 secs.

I also installed iReboot so I can now reboot to 7 or XP from the tray icon!

Oh, and for all those that were wondering why I did this, it's because despite many work-around attempts, I cannot get COD4 or PunkBuster to be precise to work under Windows 7 at the moment and I play a lot of clan matches ... now when I want to play I just reboot in to XP and off I go ... it's just a fresh install of XP SP2 x64 with COD4 / Ventrilo installed with some freebie AV suite ... fresh install of XP runs rather quick on an Quad Core 3Ghz with 4GB ram lol ...