Dual boot Win 7 & XP from separate HDDs

24seven

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Feb 16, 2012
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Hey folks,

I want to combine my 2 desktops into one, since I never use both together and the older one is very dated by now (think Time/tiny computers old). My current machine is an Asus P5Q-E with a C2D and has one HDD on a SATA connection running windows 7 64bit. The old computer is a single core Athlon 2700+ thing with a pair of hard drives on a single IDE ribbon.

What I want to do is put the hard drives from the old machine into the newer and be able to choose between Windows XP already installed on the old master IDE hard drive and Windows 7 on the newer SATA drive (I've only kept the old computer to run XP for compatibility), all the while keeping the old slave IDE drive as a slave.

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance,
Guy
 

24seven

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I've already put the IDE drive with XP in this computer on it's own and updated all the drivers etc without any issues to make sure it will run.

The SATA drive with windows 7 is 320Gb, the primary IDE drive with XP is 250Gb and the slave IDE with no OS is 60Gb. Can I literally just plug the 2 IDE drives into my motherboard with one set as the Primary and the other as a slave? Will this not cause a conflict with the other SATA drive being the primary drive?
 

mb230kc

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I did something like this not too long ago. I have xp on a 500 gb hdd and 2 smaller unused hdds. I installed win 7 pro on the larger of the 2 hdds.

I then used EasyBCD to dual boot. You can use this url to guide you

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

Go to option 2 step 7 to get to the dual booting of the 2 systems.

If your cpu is a single core, then you can open your xp side as a virtual system following the information in these urls

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/8054/how-to-turn-a-physical-computer-into-a-virtual-machine-with-disk2vhd/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415

Unfortunately, my cpu is dual core, so I can't virtualize my original xp side.

You will need the following downloadable software

GenuineCheck.exe,
havdectiontool.exe,
vcredist_x64.exe,

the following pdfs have valuable info

WinXPMode_Brochure.pdf and
WXPmode_HowToGuide.pdf
 

24seven

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Ok I've got all 3 hard drives plugged in now and for some reason it doesn't seem to be seeing the install of XP on one drive as being bootable. MSConfig only shows the windows 7 drive, as does Windows 7 Manager. In the latter I tried manually adding the extra boot option and it seemed to automatically detect XP was on the E drive (when booted into win7, 7 is on drive C and XP is on drive E). Then I restarted and tried booting into XP when the option was there but instead it just rebooted the machine and it went through POST again as if I'd just turned it on.

Disk management looks like this (I've labelled each drive as to what should be one it). Also I completely messed up the drive volumes. They're smaller than I thought. [:pdxalex] Not that it should matter.

 

24seven

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I've just been back into the BIOS and I can boot into XP perfectly fine if I change the #1 drive to the one XP is installed on. However I can only have one of the hard drives in the "boot order" menu at a time, and that is always the #1 drive. Any thoughts?


[EDIT] After a google search on dual booting specifically with this motherboard the solution is to just pick one hard drive as the main one, then on startup press F8 and choose the other drive as and when I want to boot into it. So with that set I've got the Win 7 drive as the automatic choice and using F8 I can boot into XP whenever I want to. Problem solved!

Now that I know how to do it, and it's fairly straightforward, I mgiht even install a copy of Windows 95 I have lying around on the slave hard drive, just for a laugh. :D