triple boot

[bigman62]

hi there was thinking of installing windows 7 64 bit on my pc i currently have windows vista 32 bit installed.

just wondering will i have any isues having a 64 bit os and 32 os on the same hardrive?

another thing also, i try to install windows xp just now and all went well till the system reboot and did not load either os was expecting to see a boot list showing windows xp and vista but instead i got the message error reading disk.

i manged to boot from the xp cd again and remove the partition drive with xp and then put the vista cd in and repair the partition containing the vista os.

what im trying to say is what did i do wrong?
i did boot from the xp cdand install xp so dont know why it did not load xp or vista.

any advice welcome

thanks

bigman62

 

[SiriusB]

You shouldn't have any issues having a 32bit and 64bit OS on the same HDD. While one is running, the other is just files on a different partition, so there will be no interference.

The reason why your XP install failed to work is unknown to me. However, generally speaking it is better to install the older OS before a newer OS. This is because older versions of Windows don't know about Vista or 7, so do not create a proper boot loader [the menu you expected to see on boot to select your OS].

The question I have is why do you need XP, Vista and 7?

 

[bigman62]

oh right yes that makes senes thank s.
the only reasion why i was thinking of installing diffrent os is because i have loads of games that will not work on vista its games that came out before vista was around and also the reason why i want to install windows 7 64 bit is to take advantage of having more then 4gb of ram i found out recently that 32 bit os only supports 4GB ram i plan on installing more then 4GB for my system.
i know my motherboard supports 16GB so anything up to that or just below and im happy.

 

[Hudzy]

In which case you want to drop Vista and dual boot 7 and XP. But I'd try those games again in 7 first to see if they work now.

 

[SiriusB]

I agree with Hudzy. If you have 7, ditch Vista. You may be able to do an in-place upgrade, but my preference would be fresh install.