Windows 7 - Installing windows XP for duel booting?

SkScotchegg · 21 Jul 2009 at 22:47

Hi there, please can you offer me some advice.

I've currently got windows 7 beta installed with all updates and drivers, and I am wanting to have windows xp installed on the same system, so I was wondering what the easiest way of doing this was?

I have heard about duel booting before where you run a program on your current installation and you have another OS installed inside that program and I think I saw it one time where there was like a window on the desktop that you could open and maximise and then you'd be inside a whole other OS.

I have a brand new PC with quad core and 4gigs of ram so I believe my spec can handle this.

Any help given would be much appretiated.

P.S. Reasons for this is because most of my games work in windows 7 but some such as rainbow six las vegas dont, so I want xp in a duel boot setup so I can have the best of both worlds.

Thanks in advance.

Terrier_Jimlad · 21 Jul 2009 at 22:49

Couldnt get COD4 working in Win7 despite all the workarounds available, so decided to dual boot with XP the same as you, however I used 2 different drives so I could leave my SSD with Win7 on alone ... I used a program by NeoSmart calld EasyBC ... does it all for you

SkScotchegg · 21 Jul 2009 at 22:53

Can I use that program and do it all on one harddrive because I dont have another hard drive, just one big hard drive.

Thanks in advance.

Terrier_Jimlad · 21 Jul 2009 at 22:54

yeah, obviously you just need to make sure you sort the right partitions out ... take a look at their site, plenty of guides and walkthroughs

Alex74 · 21 Jul 2009 at 23:22

I suppose you could sort your partitions, install XP and then sort out your MBR for the dual boot. Wouldnt require other tools. However, I dont know how nicely that would work out on the XP boot loader (In all fairness, i dont see why it shouldnt work)

Ideally, if you can use the Windows 7 boot loader, then happy days. This is nice and easy to install configure for a dual boot setup. In your situation, this is easy on two drives, but I have no idea how you'd go about it having installing XP on top of a windows 7 install on the same drive..

Usually I install windows 7 over XP, which self-configures very nicely.

Don't have the hardware for it myself, but you could always give the XP mode beta a try?

havent had any reports regarding its use and/or performance..

Fire Wizard · 21 Jul 2009 at 23:23

SkScotchegg said:
I have heard about duel booting before where you run a program on your current installation and you have another OS installed inside that program and I think I saw it one time where there was like a window on the desktop that you could open and maximise and then you'd be inside a whole other OS.

You're referring to two different things here. Dual booting is where you have multiple operating systems installed on one system, weather that be the operating systems installed on a single hard disk which is partitioned or installed on separate hard disk drives. Regardless of how you set it up, when you start your machine, you will have the choice to boot into either of the operating systems that you have installed.

The descriptive part you have written is what is referred to as a virtual machine. You will want to do the former though.

Out of curiosity, what sort of error messages are you getting when trying to install or try to run Rainbow Six?

SkScotchegg · 22 Jul 2009 at 03:47

Thanks for your replies.

Rainbow Six Las Vegas was causing me and my cousin endless problems, we were having problems connecting to each others machine over lan and online and also we had a bug where when I was in game he couldnt hear me on team speak, and we never used to have either of these problems before on xp.

The single player was working fine.