Dual boot Win 7 on Drive 1 with Vista preinstalled on Drive 0

Indigo

Active Member
Back again; Happy 2009 (and joyous Win 7 Beta testing!) to all!

As the title implies i wish to dual boot Win 7 Beta on my second internal HDD (Drive 1) with Vista already preinstalled on the first internal HDD (Drive 0); both SATA. I would like the boot menu to simply allow me to choose which of the two OSs to boot into.

How do I go about achieving this with EasyBCD. Would the Win 7 install still corrupt my Vista bootloader? Is there any risk of the Vista system restore etc getting corrupted by the Beta?

Grateful for any help/advice/guidance.
 
You should just be able to insert the Win7 DVD and install from there. It should pick up the Vista install and create a entry no problem. No need for EasyBCD unless a entry was not made.
 
So it does auto-pickup? From the errors you were describing it didn't...
Oh well, will find out soon enough... :smile:
 
The MS instructions on the W7 download page make it clear that you can auto dual-boot.
The MS rule, is oldest first, latest last, always works.
The systems are written to be backward compatible with previous systems and bootloaders.
The problem with XP borking Vista's bootloader is because it breaks the golden rule by putting an older system on after a newer.
Same applies to the restore points. W7 won't be any threat to an older OS (excepting that all Betas might screw with you of course), but XP will screw W7 restore points, and in theory Vista might mess with W7 points too.
Since W7 is to some extent Vista II, I don't think it has any incompatibilities in the system restore area, and I didn't notice any such warning in the W7 release notes.
 
Last edited:
Thank you all for responding.

Terry, grateful for your more complete response; this is clearly reassuring. I should be back in London by Thursday so will give this a go. BTW congratulations on your recent well deserved promotion and to Justin too on his elevation!
 
I installed the Windows 7 and it just added an entry to the ones I already had there.
All the boot entries also show up in the Windows 7 Startup located under Startup and Recovery in System Properties.
 
Thanks Pat.
Welcome to NST.
Drop by the Water Cooler and have a chat when you've an idle moment.
 
Can anyone confirm yet who is dual-booting w/ win 7 and xp if we're still having restore point issues like we did with Vista?

I should find out here in the next few days when I get around to getting win 7 installed but for now I'm just curious if anyone knows the answer...
 
Must be a problem Justin.
Nobody's rewritten XP, and W7 would have had to revert to XP restore points for XP not to see them as "dodgy" and "fix" them.
 
One would have hoped they changed the location compared to where XP is used to looking so its not a problem anymore, but if not I suppose it'll be the same as before.
 
True ! They could always rename the folder so that XP doesn't recognize it.
We'll both see fairly soon.
My money is on it being identical to Vista.
 
So it does auto-pickup? From the errors you were describing it didn't...
Oh well, will find out soon enough... :smile:
It all depends on how you set it up. I had set up a dual boot Windows 7 system. I did not have a Windows Vista install anymore.

Plus the install of Windows 7 that i did have was not the one that had the MBR on the hard drive. It was the one that was freshly created.

My situation was different and unique.
 
7 now installed without a hitch; thanks to all who replied to my OP.

Not bad at all; so far all my applications seem to run fine but haven't tried out the media centre bits yet. Vista II ... oops, I mean Win 7 is clearly an improvement on its predecessor and may yet prove a worthy successor to XP. For that we'll have to wait and see how the corporates and XP diehards react. Clever pricing may well dispel any resistance; we'll see.

Anyone tried the beta on a netbook yet? I would be also be interested to see a slimmer netbook version; hopefully MS will relent and not just produce OEM for this, if at all.

So far, so good. Would be good to hear what the others think of 7 so far.
 
Win 7 has been claimed to work on some netbooks according to places around the web. Of course MS would want this so they can jump on board for pre-installs on each netbook purchase.

One would have hoped they changed the location compared to where XP is used to looking so its not a problem anymore, but if not I suppose it'll be the same as before.

Well just tried this out and unfortunately it is the same as Vista. Probably another error to put into books of things wrong with Windows that MS will not ever fix.

However, HnS works as before and so does the registry zap published by MS for XP to prevent this behavior. I tested Vista as well and there weren't any problems with it messing with Win 7.
 
Last edited:
Just for the record, I installed Windows 7 to my Eee 900 PC, and it was S.L.O.W.

Went back to XP the next day.
 
Just for the record, I installed Windows 7 to my Eee 900 PC, and it was S.L.O.W.

Went back to XP the next day.

Thank you; one suspected this! Hence my interest in a possible netbook version. Also the makers of nLite will undoubtedly come up with a '7Lite' (hopefully a modified vLite?) to customise a much slimmer 7 install!
 
Aside from performance it still takes up a good 15 to 20 gbs for installation like other versions of Windows. Not sure an older netbook with only that much for a hard drive would be a good idea anyway for running it.
 
It didn't use that much on my Eee. Can't remember now, but I'm fairly certain it was < 10GB for a stock install.
 
Back
Top