Windows 7 RC

[longgone]

I have downloaded a few copies of Windows 7 RC .. I would like to put it on both of my machines .. secondary one first to see how it goes .. if good then on the primary one ... my questions are these/this ...On both machines I have XP already installed ... can I install the Win7 RC and still keep the XP without damage to XP Does the Win7 RC have to be installed on the same hard drive as the XP installation or can it be on a different hard drive ...These are my two most main concerns for the moment .. depending upon the answers ,, I will probably have several more ...TIA

[aldago]

I have downloaded a few copies of Windows 7 RC .. I would like to put it on both of my machines .. secondary one first to see how it goes .. if good then on the primary one ... my questions are these/this ...On both machines I have XP already installed ... can I install the Win7 RC and still keep the XP without damage to XP Does the Win7 RC have to be installed on the same hard drive as the XP installation or can it be on a different hard drive ...These are my two most main concerns for the moment .. depending upon the answers ,, I will probably have several more ...TIA

I have had Windows XP Professional SP2 and Win 7 RC Evaluation copy Build 7100 operating for some time on two separate partitions with no problems. So far, nothing extraordinary has happened to my WinXP. Don't know about installing Win 7 on a second hard drive. I thought the second drive had to be slaved. If not, you'd probably have to make it bootable in your BIOS and then select it from a "select boot device" menu. Good Luck! Interesting problem and I'll be watching this site for any replies to that.

[Tushman]

Does the Win7 RC have to be installed on the same hard drive as the XP installation or can it be on a different hard drive ...

It does not matter. If you're going to dual-boot on the same hard drive, just make sure you have enough free space so you can create a separate partition. (NEVER dual-boot on the same partition). Keep in mind this is beta software and therefore, it's preferable to use a HDD with non-critical/non-important files on it. Read my post here along with Bambi's comments.

[Frank Golden]

I've been dual booting Win 7 since beta (build 7000). I have XP on the first partition (22 GB) and Win 7 installed on an identicallysized partition at the end of my drive. No problems.I haven't tried to install on my first partition (XP) nor will I. Win 7 works just fine where it is and coexists nicely with XP and 4 Linux distros on this drive.I have not seen any of the things Tushman has experienced. There hasn't been anything at the Win 7 forum about this either.These issues may be peculiar to Tushman's setup. I don't know.

[Frank Golden]

i do have xp and win 7 on the same machine and both os's do fine.(of course xp was loaded first...)

Is it a must to install XP first and does it need to be at the beginning of the drive?I know it must be installed first and at the start of the drive for dual booting Ubuntu linux or other linux distros.

[Tushman]

I have not seen any of the things Tushman has experienced. There hasn't been anything at the Win 7 forum about this either.These issues may be peculiar to Tushman's setup. I don't know.

Did you read Bambi's comments in my thread? Her problems were almost identical to mine. I don't think the problem is particular to my setup. Edited May 29, 2009 by Tushman

[Tushman]

Is it a must to install XP first and does it need to be at the beginning of the drive?I know it must be installed first and at the start of the drive for dual booting Ubuntu linux or other linux distros.

XP does indeed need to be installed first in order. Whether or not it has to be loaded on the 1st partition I'm not entirely sure - I've never done it. I have however setup dual-boot situations Win98/XP and W2K/XP and I can tell you it's best to install XP on the 1st partition. Simply for the fact that there has to be atleast 1 primary active partition designated for Windows. If you create two primary partitions and try to force XP to install onto the 2nd (rather than the 1st), the drive letter assignments would *probably* get messed up - not 100% positive about that.Question is why wouldn't you want XP on the 1st partition and Vista/Win7 on the 2nd? Is there any real benefit of doing it the way other way around?

[Frank Golden]

XP does indeed need to be installed first in order. Whether or not it has to be loaded on the 1st partition I'm not entirely sure - I've never done it. I have however setup dual-boot situations Win98/XP and W2K/XP and I can tell you it's best to install XP on the 1st partition. Simply for the fact that there has to be atleast 1 primary active partition designated for Windows. If you create two primary partitions and try to force XP to install onto the 2nd (rather than the 1st), the drive letter assignments would *probably* get messed up - not 100% positive about that.Question is why wouldn't you want XP on the 1st partition and Vista/Win7 on the 2nd? Is there any real benefit of doing it the way other way around?

I don't think there is any benefit to installing the other way around. Installing XP on the first partition and before installing any other OS in a dual/multiboot is the way to go.My purpose to asking the question was to verify that as the proper method for multibooting XP.I wouldn't want someone to mess things up by trying to setup a dualboot/multiboot the "wrong" way.I've been there, done that when I first started messing with XP/Linux multiboots several years ago.Thank's for clearing this up Tushman. Edited May 29, 2009 by Frank Golden

[mac]

Does the Win7 RC have to be installed on the same hard drive as the XP installation or can it be on a different hard drive ...

I have XP Pro installed on the first partition of the first HDD (HD0) and WIN7 Beta installed on the second partition of the second HDD (HD1), so yes, the WIN7 install can be on a different HDD than the one that XP is installed onto.Tushman makes a good point about making a backup or image of your HDD/s before installing WIN7 just in case... Especially on a production machine.BTW, I quad-boot MS O/Ses - Main XP for work, browsing, email, etc; Games XP for gaming; Vista Ultimate 32bit; and WIN7 Beta 64bit. All O/Ses coexist peacefully, and were installed without any boot utilities. I have a single NTSF partition "DATA" that all the O/Ses use for My Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc. So even if one of the O/Ses gets fatal errors, all my data is on a seperate partition and is also backed up to a USB HDD.HTH

[Frank Golden]

for a while i was loading os on a partition and programs on another, butwhat's the point in that, as the programs (in windows) are no good without window's registry.so, programs & os now go on the same partitionbut, yeah, i keep my data on a separate partition too.

When I installed Word, MS Digital Image pro and MS Streets and Trips, all large programs I instructed the installer to install to U:Program Files, U: being a large NTFS partition I use for large programs like these. They get installed with all the proper registry entries but don't use any space on my C: partition. I also have a folder on U: that contains about a bunch of MP3's,I simply point WMP to these to build a media library. I also have PortableFirefox, PortableThunderbird and Portable OpenOfficeinstalled at U:Program Files as these programs tend to get bigger with use or are large to start with.All this helps to spread the load.I also keep most of my data on U: or L: (a Fat32 partition I share with Linux).

[aldago]

Mac,I guess I'm puzzled. You have WinXP on one HDD and Win7 on another HDD and you don't use any boot utilities. When you turn on your machine what do you see? How do you select which version of Windows opens???

[Tushman]

Mac,I guess I'm puzzled. You have WinXP on one HDD and Win7 on another HDD and you don't use any boot utilities. When you turn on your machine what do you see? How do you select which version of Windows opens???

There is no 3rd party boot manager required when multi-booting with MS operating systems. (The same holds true when dual-booting with Windows OS and Linux). As long as you install the older OS (in this case WinXP) first, the boot menu is created and taken care of during the installation of Vista/Win7. After it's done, the user is then presented with a black "DOS" like menu screen so he/she can choose which OS to boot at system startup.

[Tushman]

for a while i was loading os on a partition and programs on another, butwhat's the point in that, as the programs (in windows) are no good without window's registry....

The sole reason why I do so is because I have about 10-14 different video games installed on XP which total in size around 50 GB. If I had them isntalled to the default "C:\Program Files" directory, the image sizes would be huge - and besides that, there is no point in making backups for my video games. The rest of my programs are installed on the same partition as my OS.

[mac]

The sole reason why I do so is because I have about 10-14 different video games installed on XP which total in size around 50 GB. If I had them isntalled to the default "C:\Program Files" directory, the image sizes would be huge - and besides that, there is no point in making backups for my video games. The rest of my programs are installed on the same partition as my OS.

That's pretty much the same reason I have two XP Pro installs on this PC. The "Games" XP install (H:\) only contains games and a couple of utilities like RoboForm. I've tweaked the Services configuration to turn off services not needed for playing games on the PC (I do not play on-line games). I used BlackViper's Tweaked Services configuration to make the adjustments. Like you, I don't want or need to image the game installs when I image my main XP install, and data partition.I also use a program called Alcohol 120 to make a virtual CD or DVD image of all my games and then install the game from that image. This eliminates the need to put the game CD/DVD into the drive to play the game. Those images are on a seperate partition which I make an image of after I've installed a new game. Edited June 2, 2009 by mac

[aldago]

There is no 3rd party boot manager required when multi-booting with MS operating systems. (The same holds true when dual-booting with Windows OS and Linux). As long as you install the older OS (in this case WinXP) first, the boot menu is created and taken care of during the installation of Vista/Win7. After it's done, the user is then presented with a black "DOS" like menu screen so he/she can choose which OS to boot at system startup.

Thanks for responding. I misunderstood your original statement. I thought you meant you didn't need a boot manager. I have machines with WinXP and Win7 as well as WinXP and Linux with no 3rd party boot manager. When using two separate drives, do you start the installation on the first drive and then tell the machine to install the other operating system on the other drive? And then Windows know that there are two operating systems on two different drives? Does the second hard drive have to be slaved?? This seems like a super way to operate when you want to use two different operating systems. Are there any downsides?

[mac]

Thanks for responding. I misunderstood your original statement. I thought you meant you didn't need a boot manager. I have machines with WinXP and Win7 as well as WinXP and Linux with no 3rd party boot manager. When using two separate drives, do you start the installation on the first drive and then tell the machine to install the other operating system on the other drive? And then Windows know that there are two operating systems on two different drives? Does the second hard drive have to be slaved?? This seems like a super way to operate when you want to use two different operating systems. Are there any downsides?

If your PC has an older motherboard and has PATA HDDs (the connection cable looks like a wide ribbon and has a wide plug), then you would need to set the jumper on the back of the PATA HDD that you're going to install XP onto as Master. The other PATA HDD's jumper would need to be set as Slave. On newer motherboards with PATA ports, both PATA HDDs can be set to Cable Select if you're using 80 wire ribbon cable, and then the PATA HDD that you're going to install XP onto needs to be plugged into the connector on the opposite end of the ribbon cable from the connector that you plugged into the motherboard which will make it the Master. The 2nd PATA HDD is plugged into the middle connector of the ribbon cable and will become the Slave PATA HDD.All modern motherboards now come with SATA connectors (and some also have PATA connectors). In this case, find the connector (port) on the motherboard that is labeled SATA0 (that's a zero) and plug in the SATA HDD that you're going to install XP onto into that connector. There is no Master/Slave relationship with SATA drives, each SATA connector can only be plugged into a single optical drive or HDD. On this PC both optical drives and all 3 HDDs are SATA drives. The second SATA HDD can be plugged into any other SATA connector, as once you've installed XP onto the SATA HDD connected to SATA port 0, it becomes the boot drive.At least this is how it works with MS O/Ses. I don't do Linux (yet) and don't know if Linux O/Ses work the same.

[Tushman]

In this case, find the connector (port) on the motherboard that is labeled SATA0 (that's a zero) and plug in the SATA HDD that you're going to install XP onto into that connector. There is no Master/Slave relationship with SATA drives, each SATA connector can only be plugged into a single optical drive or HDD. On this PC both optical drives and all 3 HDDs are SATA drives. The second SATA HDD can be plugged into any other SATA connector, as once you've installed XP onto the SATA HDD connected to SATA port 0, it becomes the boot drive.At least this is how it works with MS O/Ses. I don't do Linux (yet) and don't know if Linux O/Ses work the same.

Actually Mac, I think you can connect the 1st SATA HDD into any of the SATA ports on the motherboard; the numbering does not matter. I could be wrong about that. However if you're setting up a RAID system, the numbering of the ports does matter. Usually the motherboard manual will specify ports 0 & 1 and will usually be located on a different part of the MB than the rest of the SATA ports.If you've got multiple HDDs inside your case, it is probably the best practice to put the boot/OS drive on SATA port 0. Edited June 2, 2009 by Tushman

[throktar]

I have yet to see a SATA0. Generally, SATA1 through SATA6 depending on the mobo. The only thing that uses Disk 0 is Disk Management under Storage. That includes mobos from Jetway, Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte.

[mac]

I have yet to see a SATA0. Generally, SATA1 through SATA6 depending on the mobo. The only thing that uses Disk 0 is Disk Management under Storage. That includes mobos from Jetway, Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte.

Intel DG43NB that I just installed to replace an old ASUS mb which failed. It has 6 SATA ports - labeled on the mb as SATA0 thru SATA5. Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4 installed Feb 08 on this PC has 6 SATA ports - identified on the mb and in the manual as SATAII0 thru SATAII5.Edit: the 7 year old ASUS P4P800 Deluxe has two SATA ports- labled SATA1 and SATA2. So it appears that different MB manufacturers use different numbering schemes. Edited June 3, 2009 by mac