Tech Outpost

[Railway]

can someone introduce me a boot manager?

i am currently using win7 on hard disk one.

however i wish to install winxp on hard disk two.

how do i get my system to dual os?

as in i can select which os to boot up etc.

[SUBASH_PRABU Symantec Employee]

Hi,

   You have to empty another drive ( other than your win7 drive ) to make way for the XP to dual boot in your PC. 

1. Boot from XP cd

2. Select that empty drive when asked for

3. Go through the installation

 4. After completing the XP installaton the PC will ask you to choose the OS to boot from while restarting

And while dual booting a Hard Drive the lower version of the Operating System should be the first OS in the Hard Drive.

ie: XP first Win 7 next.

[huwyngr Norton Fighter]

I strongly recommend EasyBCD free utility.

I install it on both OS"s just in case I can't get into one and I use the Backup function in it before making any major changes.

Note that you may have a problem if you try to set up dual booting with XP after WIN 7 is installed since Microsoft changed the boot procedure from that used by XP (boot ini etc) and when you install it on its own it creates a hidden 100MB partition on your drive that contains the boot information so XP cannot see that.

If XP is there first and you install Windows 7 afterwards then Windows 7 puts the files into the root of the drive where XP can see them.

You may have to start the installation from within WIndows 7 and not by booting to your XO installation disk.

It is not simple when Windows 7 is there first! .... as you can see from this:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html 

Are you sure you want to?

[SUBASH_PRABU Symantec Employee]

Yup that hapens even in Linux Windows dual booting also

First you have to install Windows then go for Linux. Because Linux can see windows drives and windows cannot do the same.

You can utilize hughs xperience and give the EasyBCD a try ( Have Caution while playing with Boot Section )

[huwyngr Norton Fighter]

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subash88 wrote:

[ ... ] You can utilize hughs xperience and give the EasyBCD a try ( Have Caution while playing with Boot Section )

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That's why I make EasyBCD backup.

But in reality it's "just" a GUI for the builtin BCDEdit function whjich I gather is pretty un-userfriendly unless you like command line stuff which I don't.

You would have to go out of your way, I think, to get to a function to manually edit to something that might not work.

It has a small portfolio of "Useful Tools" that you can download seperately and one is called iReboot (Surprised Apple havaen't jumped on them!) which is great for multibooters who do things requiring a reboot -- like some Windows Updates even -- since you can right mouse click on the System Tray icon for it -- a blue cap -- and select which OS you want to return to on the next reboot only. So if you are not in the default one you can click on that select another OS and then when whatever you are doing you don't have to hang around to override the default in program manager (something that Windows 7 does when you install it and it needs to reboot during the process -- it reboots to what's in process).

A trivial thing but like good ideas a godsend when you have it.

[Brian_K]

Railway,

I use BootIt BM. It makes no difference in what order the OS are installed. DOS, FreeDOS, Win95, Win98, Win2000, WinXP, Vista, Win7, Win8, Linux distros. You can have the lot if you like. In any order. They are independent so you can delete any OS and it doesn't affect the others. Easy to use too.

[huwyngr Norton Fighter]

Brian ....

I like Free ....

I'm puzzled at what you say about it does not matter what order you install in -- I thought the problem of XP after WIN 7 was something that occurred regardless of the BCD Editor you use since it is the actual structure of the WIN 7 bootloader (?) that was destroyed when you installed XP after WIN 7.

Unless installing WIN 7 first, then installing the boot manager and saving the WIN 7 boot setup and restoring it from XP afterwards does it.

But EasyBCD is just a GUI for the existing Boot with easy editing rather than a Boot Manager so yours sounds like it might be the equivalent of dear old BootMagic updated for further OS's ?

[Brian_K]

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huwyngr wrote:

Brian ....

I like Free ....

I'm puzzled at what you say about it does not matter what order you install in --

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Hi Hugh,

XOSL is free but isn't as powerful as BIBM...

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Ghost-How-does-one-load-an-image-to-a-partition...

XOSL and BIBM allow you to have independent OS. For example, if you have WinXP and then install Win7 and use the Microsoft boot manager, the Win7 booting files are installed in WinXP. So when you boot you see a menu to choose your OS. But if you delete WinXP, Win7 won't boot because its booting files are gone. Win7 was dependent on WinXP.

With independent booting the booting files remain in the relevant OS. It's just as if there was only one OS on that HD. So you could install Win7 first and WinXP second or vice versa. Neither OS knows about the other and there are no shared files. WinXP and Win7 are truly independent.

See "What's Wrong with the Microsoft Way?"

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.shtml

[huwyngr Norton Fighter]

Thanks for the additional detailsl -- I'll follow that up and do some reading.

[Brian_K]

The method Dan Goodell describes is somewhat different from the suggested BIBM method. BIBM allows over 200 primary partitions per HD so you can install OS into primary partitions. As you can only have 4 primary partitions in the partition table, BIBM lets you choose which 4 partitions will be loaded for that particular boot item. For example, let's say your HD contained Win7a, Win7b, Win7c, Win7d, Win7e, data1, data2, data3, data4, data5. One boot item could be Win7b, data2, data4. Another boot item could be Win7e, data4. So different OS can share common data partitions. Your choice.

Edit... I don't have multiple data partitions. I just have data1.