Dual mode booting

[crewchief97]

Pros and cons of dual boot mode, thinking about getting a new computer with two harddrives, one for windows 7 and one for XP. Have read a little about it, does anybody have any experience with it, good bad ?

 

[CheapVehicleWrap]

You can boot multiple OS's off 1 drive.

 

[ncpdfsb]

if you use one drive you will have to partition the disk, we use four drives with a boot menu at post. see below link for more info.

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/multi-boot-managers.shtml

 

[jiarby]

these days hard drives are so cheap.. this week I bought two 640gb WD Black 7200 rpm drives for $35 each.

Even a "green" low rpm, low power 2Tb drive is $80 today at newegg. Just buy two separate HDD's and put one O/S on each one by itself. Then use a 3rd drive for data... and one more for backup.

I would not bother with partitioning. I would just install a separate drive. Install your XP on the new drive...Win7 on the other. Then I would use the BIOS to select which drive I want to boot from.

Less elegant than a partition manager & boot menu, but less moving parts and simpler.

 

[crewchief97]

Thanks :U Rock:

 

[round man]

There are several options to dual boot,all you really need is the proper partitions for the boot sequence of each OS. I can personally boot into linux, ubuntu win xp or win7 here. I have to do this in order for my studies at tech school here so it is not by my choosing. Some of the folks at school also use a piece of software that is called vmware(virtual machine software) . It allows you to boot into your favorite Microsoft OS(Win 7 in my case) and then run the other OS's as virtual machines. If you are just running xp and win7 I would load a copy of win7 pro and use their virtual xp freebee version as it is basically the same format as vmware and runs quite well without the hassles of a dual boot. Virtual XP functions quite well and does just about anything you'll need to do once you get past the driver conflict issues for xp and win 7. I have had to load xp drivers into virtual xp then manually mount usb dongles in virtual xp for some programs to work but once I did they seemed to function as if they being run in just xp. Any way you look at the task you are planning to tackle I suggest some reading is due as there will be a definate learning curve to get the two systems to function on the same machine. VIRTUAL XP was written and designed to tackle this very task you seek to do.

 

[VinylLabs.com]

does compatibility mode not work for you?

what about a virtual machine?

 

[crewchief97]

Thanks for all the help!!!!!

 

[round man]

Compatibility mode works for a lot of programs in the 32 bit versions of windows 7 but you'll need to run virtual xp in order for the 32 bit drivers to function in 64 bit windows 7.

edited to add,...a 32 bit operating system can only recognize 4 gb of ram,... thats it no more. If you want to use more ram than 4gb for any reason you'll need to run a 64 bit operating system on a compatible 64 bit hardware platform.

 

[ddarlak]

roundman, i envy your knowledge/experience....

i'm a computer guy at heart making a living in the sign industry... kinda lost/loosing track of the hobby....

 

[signage]

Roundman when running in virtual xp in order for the 32 bit drivers to function in 64 bit windows 7.

Will you have use of more than 4GB of memory?

 

[round man]

Thats a good question,.I'll have to research it some here,Signage. Xp by default will not access more than 4 gb of ram so I don't think they would have rewritten the program just for that.Virtual machines only emulate processors and hardware environments so the os can run in a simulated environment,in other words an imaginary machine. I did read where win 7 may access more than 4 gb of ram in its 32 bit versions and that the 4gb limit was for xp only. It seems win 7 can only use 4 gb for each application,.the math here is 2 to the 32nd power equals about 4 billion possible memory addresses so that adds up to only 4gb on 32 bit systems,newer chips have a different way of addressing memory locations so they can see more than 4gb on a 32 bit sysytem but windows OS's can only address 4 gb per application or just a little less like 3.6gb per application. So if you want to run two programs on a win 7 32b station you can use just shy of 4gb of memory on each program at the same time.This is why many of the manufacturers are switching to a 64 bit platform for their memory intensive design software.

 

[round man]

Just wanted to add it woud seem that there would be a need for a dual and or quad core processor to use more than 4gb of memory at one time on a 32 bit operating system, dual core would allow win 7 to run 2 programs simultaneously on one processor,...quad cores could theoretically run 4 such programs within those parameters.

 

[wetgravy]

these days hard drives are so cheap.. this week I bought two 640gb WD Black 7200 rpm drives for $35 each.

Even a "green" low rpm, low power 2Tb drive is $80 today at newegg. Just buy two separate HDD's and put one O/S on each one by itself. Then use a 3rd drive for data... and one more for backup.

I would not bother with partitioning. I would just install a separate drive. Install your XP on the new drive...Win7 on the other. Then I would use the BIOS to select which drive I want to boot from.

Less elegant than a partition manager & boot menu, but less moving parts and simpler.

+1 to that. Had a system that did just that. Allowed me to be able to completely utilize a hard drive for an OS and transfer files without having to store them in the cache buffer to transfer them to the other virtual drives.

 

[round man]

If that is the way you choose to go I would suggest a removable drive bay enclosure.We have systems like that at tech school that have removable hard drive bays,....tha drives screw into a plastic housing and go in and out like drawers in a dresser. they also have locks to keep them from coming loose while in use.