Dual boot XP - Win7

I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.

Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?

johns

johns wrote:
I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.

Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?

johns

I can see an example of a solution here, but this fixes
WinXP deleting the more modern OS restore points. This
would hide the Windows 7 volume, so WinXP can't see it.
(I don't understand, why the articles have no concerns about
the other direction. I would have thought changes could be
made to WinXP, that would cause the SR points there to be
invalidated as well.)

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/12...ot-delete.html

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/2008/06...m-restore-bug/

"Personally, I no longer recommend dual-boot setups at all. I prefer using
Virtual PC, VMWare, or another virtualization solution to run XP in a
virtual machine under Vista. On those rare occasions when I need to test XP and
Vista on the same hardware, I swap the hard drives and access shared data files
from a server to avoid this issue."

So there is an opinion for you.

*******

One way to solve this problem, with hardware, is by using SCSI drives.

I selected the cheapest, reasonable brand I could find. You'd need a controller
card too, to connect up the drive. You can find cheap cards for it, if you
keep your eyes open. (I have a couple, but they're not ultra 320 or anything.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148279

Then, downloaded a manual for it.

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/s...100384776j.pdf

On PDF page 47, it has a WP or Write Protect jumper location.
(J6 jumper block, only available on LW drive in this particular
case.) If you purchase a toggle switch, a pair of wires, and
female pins to plug onto the WP position of J6, you can have
a write protect switch mountable on the front of the computer.

If you had two SCSI drives, you could WP A and boot B, or WP B
and boot A. By making the alternate drive "read-only" with the
jumper, no worries about system restore.

Will the OS complain about finding a read-only drive ? Probably :-)
But a hardware "gate" to prevent writing, means no kludgy software
solutions to this problem.

Your data drive can then be a large IDE, while two small SCSI drives
function as separate boot drives.

*******

With regard to running apps from a second OS, apps come in two
flavors.

1) Applications dependent on registry structures to be in place.
If a program has an installer, and the installer is the only
thing that can put the right registry structures in place, then
you *have* to use the installer. The installer might, for
example, be handling the licensing key.

2) Other applications may be designed to be portable. If you look
at a lot of stuff on Sysinternals.com , the programs there are
portable. You could boot an alternate OS, and execute one of them.

If you installed Firefox in WinXP, then booted Windows 7 and ran it,
Firefox does a runtime install of its "Profile" folder. So programs
can and do install things at runtime. But they may also have good
reason, to be adding structures via the installer. There is at least
one other folder with Firefox stuff in it, and I don't know
if that is a runtime feature or not.

Something you'd expect to be anal, would be Microsoft Office. If you
installed that on WinXP, then booted Windows 7 and double clicked
one of the .exe files, there's no way that is going to run.

Applications can be designed for portability. But, there has to be
a reason to support it. Think of the difficulties, if you design a
portable app, but need different behaviors or preferences, when
operated in Win98 versus Windows 7. In such a situation, using
the registry is the perfect solution, as it is a "per-OS" solution.
You can do it with your own preferences storage solution, but it'll
mean keeping separate settings for each OS environment used.

*******

In terms of virtual machine options, you can use VPC2007 to run an
OS within your new OS. You could run WinXP inside a separate window
with VPC2007.

Certain versions of Windows 7, support "WinXP Mode", which is a separate
copy of WinXP and its own license, with "terminal services" display
implementation. It allows a WinXP program to be "rootless", so there
isn't a box drawn around the desktop area like in VPC2007. Each WinXP
mode application launched, opens a window as if it was displaying native
in Windows 7. But the window is a Terminal Services window.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...indows_XP_Mode

Your existing OS can be virtualized as well, lock, stock and barrel.
Try this for example. When "pulled into a virtual machine", the hardware
environment is entirely different. The OS will need to be re-activated,
against the new hardware. If you have a Dell, obviously the license key
issue is going to be an issue. If you have a non-royalty OEM install,
as long as you haven't done an install lately, you might get away with it.
I've tested this, but didn't activate it (I disconnected the network
cable while testing). This even has a feature, to correct the HAL
option, to account for the multicore original environment, to single
core VPC2007 environment differences. I think it's an amazing utility,
considering it did the job without issues. (I've tried other recipes
that failed.) You run the resulting .vhd file, in a VPC2007 virtual
machine. That would allow you to run the programs used in that OS,
without physically having to reinstall them.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/s.../ee656415.aspx

Those two examples of virtual environments are no good for games,
but are OK for other more serious kinds of work. I tried another
virtual environment the other day, but it was a "flaky pastry"
and not even worth mentioning.

Paul

"johns" wrote:
I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.

Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?


Since you'll have the two OSes on separate HDs, why not
just disable one or the other HD in the BIOS at startup? Or,
you could put the HDs on removeable trays that slide into a
rack that is installed in an unused bay and just choose the OS
by choosing which tray to slide in? Otherwise, if you do regualar
backups, do you really care if you lose a restore point?

*TimDaniels*

On 07/11/2010 02:46, johns wrote:
I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.

Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?

johns

Before I installed Windows 7, I had, and still do, a copy of WinXP on my
HD. I partitioned this hardrive and made a 100GB partition for Windows 7.
I then insterted the Win7 Disc, and selected 'Custom' Install
This allowed me to select the partition I wanted to install Windows 7 on
to. Once this process was complete, my PC rebooted, several times during
the install process, and finally showed a screen which had Windows 7 and
WindowsXP to choose to boot from.

Its been like that for a while now and works perfectly for me.

"Bob H" wrote:
johns wrote:
I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.

Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?

johns

Before I installed Windows 7, I had, and still do, a copy of WinXP on my HD. I partitioned this hardrive and made a
100GB partition for Windows 7.
I then insterted the Win7 Disc, and selected 'Custom' Install
This allowed me to select the partition I wanted to install Windows 7 on to. Once this process was complete, my PC
rebooted, several times during the install process, and finally showed a screen which had Windows 7 and WindowsXP to
choose to boot from.

Its been like that for a while now and works perfectly for me.

Johns's concern is about the overwriting of restore points. One OS (I forget
which one) overwrites the restore point of the other OS. If one doesn't rely on
restore points, this concern is moot. I, for one, don't rely on restore points
since I make periodic backups.

*TimDaniels*

On 07/11/2010 16:36, Timothy Daniels wrote:
"Bob H" wrote:
johns wrote:
I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.

Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?

johns

Before I installed Windows 7, I had, and still do, a copy of WinXP on my HD. I partitioned this hardrive and made a
100GB partition for Windows 7.
I then insterted the Win7 Disc, and selected 'Custom' Install
This allowed me to select the partition I wanted to install Windows 7 on to. Once this process was complete, my PC
rebooted, several times during the install process, and finally showed a screen which had Windows 7 and WindowsXP to
choose to boot from.

Its been like that for a while now and works perfectly for me.

Johns's concern is about the overwriting of restore points. One OS (I forget
which one) overwrites the restore point of the other OS. If one doesn't rely on
restore points, this concern is moot. I, for one, don't rely on restore points
since I make periodic backups.

*TimDaniels*



I don't use restore points either as I do backups as well as keeping
data separate from the OS. If the OS crashes or needs to be restored, it
takes less than a day to get everything back how it was.

One of the warnings came from a poster who said that
when he actually had to use an XP restore point, he lost
the dual boot feature. Win7 was gone, and he had to go
through the install again. It sounds to me like the best
idea is to simply move the data cable to the OS I want
to boot. My data and backups are on an external drive
anyway, so it is just a small hassle to open the case
side door and move the cable.

Now, what would be
really neat is if somebody out there has a manual
sata switch box that I could place on the desk right
beside the PC .. or even mount it along the side
door. I already do that with my DSL modem. I have
a laptop and a PC desktop, and I only use one on-line
at a time, so my RJ45 cables from each box go to the
manual switch box .. and that goes out to the modem.

Same deal with my USB printer. I found a manual USB
switch box, and I can select the printer that way. Which
means I don't have a lot of wasted power, and the setup
was very very simple. Also, my PC is a super-fast game
box, so I don't want to mess around with that. Game
boxes are not always OS friendly.

johns

On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:30:16 -0800, johns wrote:

[snip]

It sounds to me like
the best idea is to simply move the data cable to the OS I want to boot.

If you have enough data connectors, you may find it easier to switch the
power. I've done that before, with 2 versions of Windows. Also, there's
fewer wires to change, so you might connect your own switch in an extra
5,25-inch bay.

[snip]

I already do that with my DSL modem.

[snip]


Same deal with my USB printer.

[snip]

The normal solution to those problems (modem and printer) would be
networking.


--
48 days until The winter celebration (Saturday December 25, 2010
12:00:00 AM).

Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in
praise of intelligence." -- Bertrand Russell

"johns" mused:
[....]
Now, what would be
really neat is if somebody out there has a manual
sata switch box that I could place on the desk right
beside the PC .. or even mount it along the side
door. [.......]

You can do that with external eSATA hard drives
if the motherboard has an onboard eSATA port. You
can also do that by extending a normal SATA cable
to an external SATA hard drive enclosure.

But I don't think you're listening. You can do virtually
that with a removeable HD tray. They're sometimes
called "hard drive caddies" or "mobile racks". Kingwin
makes/imports a big selection of them, and here's what
they have for SATA hard drives:
http://kingwin.com/products/cate/mob...obileracks.asp
You can just slide in the hard drive containing the OS that
you want, and it becomes an internal hard drive with all the
speed advantages that come with it. It is NOT a "USB drive".

Or..., if you have room for two racks, you can just leave both
trays in their respective racks and use their power switches to enable
or disable a hard drive.

Or, you can do as I do: Feed each of your internal hard drives'
power cables through DPST micro toggle switches and enable or
disable the HD by switching its power on or off. I have 3 such
switches mounted in 1/4" diam. holes in the front of the case
that are for ventilation just inside the plastic fascia, and I reach in
with a paper clip to flip the switches. (Of course, this must be
done when the PC is OFF.) With the power for a hard drive off,
no virus is going to get into it, either.

*TimDaniels*

On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:06:20 -0800, Timothy Daniels wrote:

[snip]

Or, you can do as I do: Feed each of your internal hard drives'
power cables through DPST micro toggle switches and enable or disable
the HD by switching its power on or off.

Is there some benefit to using separate switches rather than one multi-
position switch?

[snip]

*TimDaniels*


--
47 days until The winter celebration (Saturday December 25, 2010
12:00:00 AM).

Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." -- Graham Greene,
1981