Please excuse my ignorance. I am still learning and I've never formatted a hard drive, created a partition, or installed two OS's simultaneously. However, I'm in dire need of XP on two 7 machines.
We purchased two Win7 laptops and planned on installing Microsoft's "XP Mode" tool to run our database software until our database is upgraded in mid-January. However, now that I have the laptops in hand and have tried said tool, I see that the processor on these laptops is not capable of hardware virtualization, so I cannot run XP Mode. I tried to just run the database on 7, but the database uses MSDE 2000, which has known compatibility issues with 7, so that's not going to happen.
I believe my last hope now is to dual-boot both machines. However, seeing as I've never attempted this, I have no idea what I'm in for. I'm hoping someone can help me figure out exactly what to do and what order to do it in or point me to some sort of guide with screen shots or some such. Do I start by popping in the XP disc? Loading EasyBCD? Do I have to first create a partition? If so, how? I'm so lost!
TIA
~Lihai
We purchased two Win7 laptops and planned on installing Microsoft's "XP Mode" tool to run our database software until our database is upgraded in mid-January. However, now that I have the laptops in hand and have tried said tool, I see that the processor on these laptops is not capable of hardware virtualization, so I cannot run XP Mode. I tried to just run the database on 7, but the database uses MSDE 2000, which has known compatibility issues with 7, so that's not going to happen.
I believe my last hope now is to dual-boot both machines. However, seeing as I've never attempted this, I have no idea what I'm in for. I'm hoping someone can help me figure out exactly what to do and what order to do it in or point me to some sort of guide with screen shots or some such. Do I start by popping in the XP disc? Loading EasyBCD? Do I have to first create a partition? If so, how? I'm so lost!
TIA
~Lihai