Quote:

Sandra,

If you have windows 7 on drive number 2 and Windows XP on driver number 1, drive 1 will be the C drive when you boot up XP and drive number 2 will be the C drive when you boot up Win 7. Windows 7 essentially has a boot manager built in. You don’t have to do a lot of changing boot orders or cables or anything like that, especially with the newer SATA drives. If you have the older IDE drives it might be more complicated, I can’t recall.

Setting up a dual boot system on two drives with Win 7 is relatively easy. Just do it this way:

First to be absolutely sure that I didn’t regret that I was born, I would CLONE the current XP drive and set it aside as a backup against disaster. You probably won’t need it, but if something blows up in your face, you can always take the clone and just plug it into the computer and you are at least right back where you started before you changed anything. I’ve learned at least this valuable lesson. Nothing bad happens when I back up. It only goes haywire when I don’t and then with absolute certainty.

Next, of course you want that second drive installed in your machine to accept the Win 7 installation. Once you have it in and functioning, shut down your computer.
Next you are going to BOOT from the Win 7 Installation disk, tell it to INSTALL NOW and when it asks you where you want to install the OS choose the new drive NOT the one that currently has your XP installed. If you have more than one partition on the new drive choose the primary.

When the computer is restarted you should get a monochrome screen with two boot choices, EARLIER VERSION OF WINDOWS and WINDOWS 7. You will get this screen each time you boot up. You choose which OS that is going to boot here. Usually the default is the OS that you last booted I think. I think you have about 30 seconds to make the decision but if you want to change that default time you can do it in the BIOS.



This is the right way. Don't know why you'd want to consider anything else.

John
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