Two drive dual boot

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I know nothing about dual-boot setups, but I do know where to ask first.

I have an existing computer, and I have a brand-new drive for it. I would like to install Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on the new drive, and the existing drive has Vista Home Premium x32. In principle I might just remove the present drive, pop the new drive into the oven, and run the setup. I anticipate no problem in that, and I want to put Windows 7 and possibly a number of applications on the drive while it is new, especially where there are 64-bit applications available.

I have two physical drives, and when installed in two bays I could use the boot option to select Drive 0 or Drive 1 at boot. That sounds primitive and presumably is, but I could use some guidance if there are alternatives. I need the storage space that the new drive provides, but in the short run I will probably continue to run Vista, as it has drivers for everything I use where Windows 7 does not. I will eventually make Windows 7 the primary system drive, with all compatible applications installed on it. Does that make sense? (I do have all of the relevant licences, BTW.)

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I know nothing about dual-boot setups, but I do know where to ask first.

I have an existing computer, and I have a brand-new drive for it. I would like to install Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on the new drive, and the existing drive has Vista Home Premium x32. In principle I might just remove the present drive, pop the new drive into the oven, and run the setup. I anticipate no problem in that, and I want to put Windows 7 and possibly a number of applications on the drive while it is new, especially where there are 64-bit applications available.

I have two physical drives, and when installed in two bays I could use the boot option to select Drive 0 or Drive 1 at boot. That sounds primitive and presumably is, but I could use some guidance if there are alternatives. I need the storage space that the new drive provides, but in the short run I will probably continue to run Vista, as it has drivers for everything I use where Windows 7 does not. I will eventually make Windows 7 the primary system drive, with all compatible applications installed on it. Does that make sense? (I do have all of the relevant licences, BTW.)

Here’s some reading: How to dual boot Vista and Windows 7 – VISTA.BLORGE[/url] and How to dual boot Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Vista installed first) are links from ”windows 7″ dual boot vista – Bing.

Joe

--Joe

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First of all, are your mother board and processor 64 bit?
If not, then you will only be able to install the 32 bit version of Windows 7.

I have dual boot for many years and it is very simple as you described. All I have ever used was the BOOT process that is installed using the newest OS. When you install Windows 7, and tell it to install on the second drive, it will add files to the first (C) drive to do the selecting. It will normally make the new OS the default and one will need to select the other OS if that is where one needs to start up. Remember that the “C” drive is sill the boot drive as the required files are on it.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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First of all, are your mother board and processor 64 bit?

Dave – are you aware of any current CPU/motherboard combination which does not support 64-bit operation? Without evidence, I would argue that they all can, and have been able to for a small number of years…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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That is very encouraging, and it certainly reduces the ‘worry factor’. Thank you very much for the excellent links and help, and I’ll let you know how it goes (which probably won’t be today).

Peter

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Excuse me, but I’m a novice with manipulating operating systems, but I’m frustrated.

I too have two physical drives in my machine. I’ve loaded Windows 7 onto a new drive (clean install). I’ve put my old HDD into the 2nd slot on my machine, which contains VISTA. Every page and link (including the link on this thread) that I’ve come across talks about installing Win7 on a machine that is already running VISTA, not quite (I think) with what I have.

I’m booting on Win 7. It’s great, and I want it to be my primary boot. But on occasion, and for the short term, I want to be able to access the installed programs on the VISTA disk.

With both operating systems on separate disks, what do I do next to get the option at startup of the OS I want to use, (leaving Win 7 as the default)?

Al

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With both operating systems on separate disks, what do I do next to get the option at startup of the OS I want to use, (leaving Win 7 as the default)?

Hello Al (that’s not an echo you hear! ) I’m almost embarrassed to recommend this since it was FREE when I started and now they’re charging $10 for it. But, if I had it to do over, I’d pay because Dual Boot Windows 7 has been so easy to use and I’ve been from XP to dual boot with XP and Vista and now triple boot with those AND Windows 7.

Since you’re already booting to Win 7, I’d install the Boot Pro there and see if it does its usual clean thing and shows your Vista system too. I think I saw a “trial” on their web page somewhere if you want to try it first.

Others here in The Lounge like Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 – NeoSmart Technologies but I’ve no experience with that one.

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Hello Al (that’s not an echo you hear! ) I’m almost embarrassed to recommend this since it was FREE when I started and now they’re charging $10 for it. But, if I had it to do over, I’d pay because Dual Boot Windows 7 has been so easy to use and I’ve been from XP to dual boot with XP and Vista and now triple boot with those AND Windows 7.

I’ll second BigAl’s recommendation for “VistaBoot Pro”, at least that’s what it used to be called. I have been using it for a couple years to dual boot XP and Vista and now tri-booting XP, Vista and Windows 7. It’s a no-brainer to use and I do like the ability to backup the boot information in case there is ever a problem with booting into one of the systems. You can change which system you want as the primary (default) system, the bootup time, the name of the system(s), e.g., from Older Windows System to Windows Vista or XP or whatever you have, etc.

Try it…. you’ll like it!

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I have the dual boot working well, but only, I confess, after being goaded into it by the recent posts.

I followed the first of Joe’s links with only the initial portion of it, and while Win 7 was fine I found I couldn’t get Vista to stick from a cold boot, and I was preoccupied with other matters so I disconnected the new drive (and hence Win 7). Vista then worked fine but the other drive was disconnected, and as I say the recent posts led me to re-connect it and, without it costing me a penny for software, the thing works exactly as described in the link. From a cold boot I now have a choice of either Win 7 or Vista, and the secret appears to have been nothing more than disconnecting and re-connecting the new drive, which is one of the mysteries of hardware. Windows 7 tops the list of two choices, so I hit return and I’m on my way, with the password yet to come. If I want Vista, I can hit the down arrow and then return.

My thanks to all who helped, and yes, I really did only finally get it to work this night, after the thread was picked up. There is no need for a more exotic boot manager in my case, and it didn’t cost a dime. (Time, however, is another matter.)

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Here is a supplementary question. What is one to do about (software) firewalls and anti-virus with a dual-boot setup? It strikes me that if I were to use only one ‘computer’ for online use, then I could cut the cost in half. The problem is that Explorer can ‘see’ all drives, which is as it should be, but an attack on the system will have similar access. Having two anti-virus ‘users’ because you have what amounts to two systems means double the cost. From the look of things my computer will be dual boot for a considerable time to come.

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Here is a supplementary question. What is one to do about (software) firewalls and anti-virus with a dual-boot setup? It strikes me that if I were to use only one ‘computer’ for online use, then I could cut the cost in half. The problem is that Explorer can ‘see’ all drives, which is as it should be, but an attack on the system will have similar access. Having two anti-virus ‘users’ because you have what amounts to two systems means double the cost. From the look of things my computer will be dual boot for a considerable time to come.

From the setup you describe; 2 operating systems on two separate hard drives, you will have to have antivirus/anti-malware programs on both. Most/many/some vendors would allow you to install their product on both systems using the same single-user license. I checked with Kaspersky a few years back when I began dual (now tri-) booting and they had no problems with me installing KAV on all my systems which were installed on the same PC, including my virtual drives. So, depending upon which product(s) you choose to use, it may not cost you anything more.

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From the setup you describe; 2 operating systems on two separate hard drives, you will have to have antivirus/anti-malware programs on both. Most/many/some vendors would allow you to install their product on both systems using the same single-user license. I checked with Kaspersky a few years back when I began dual (now tri-) booting and they had no problems with me installing KAV on all my systems which were installed on the same PC, including my virtual drives. So, depending upon which product(s) you choose to use, it may not cost you anything more.

Ah, but these aren’t virtual drives: these are two physical drives (two partitions on each, with full access to all four under either O/S) and I can only switch systems at boot time, which means a cold boot into one or the other. As it happens, I have Norton 360 on each for the time being, and the copy of it on the system I boot into will be the only one that will be active while running on that system (and require updates, run its own scans, and so forth). I tend to doubt that they would not count as two installations rather than one.

On the other hand, as I suggested, if I use one operating system strictly offline, then I wouldn’t have to worry about it, and I would save the price of one full workstation’s commercial protection. It’s something for multiboot users to think about.

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One thing you should be aware of in Dual Boot situations with all drives visible is that your restore points and shadow copies will be erased by booting into the older OS.
See Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

Bruce

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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One thing you should be aware of in Dual Boot situations with all drives visible is that your restore points and shadow copies will be erased by booting into the older OS.
See Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

Bruce

That is pretty deep stuff, I must say. Thank you very much for the lead, as it is the sort of thing one tends not to find, except by accident, on one’s own. To top it off, on the machine in question I have Windows 7 Ultimate N. I was scratching my head for some time over the version N business, and you have led me to look it up. (It’s intended for the European market, and has IE and Media Player removed, without my even noticing I might add, although either or both can be added to suit your preferences).

I was reflecting on my own reasons for keeping the old system, such as programs that will not (yet) run on Win 7, including a very efficient download accelerator (Download Studio) that I could have used this morning with 3 downloads on the Win 7 machine and that seemed to take forever, a full-featured burning suite that was not Win 7 compatible and that I just purchased a Win 7 equivalent for to put on the Win 7 drive. I have over 5000 fonts and I am trying to update and organize them on the old drive with the management software I have there before copying them, and I have file management utilties that may not travel well (although jv16 has a duplicate file finder that must work under Win 7, and I have to admit that I haven’t even tried it). I also have seldom-used programs like Vista-compatible WordPerfect Suite that are a nuisance to set up and are chiefly there for practice if and when I get around to it or in case I need it.

And, and this is the sort of thing I worry about a bit in light of your link, I have a Vista-compatible copy of Diskeeper, which is a dedicated defragmenter which successfully defragments all of the drives it can see. That means that I can boot into Vista and apply that program, in general using it manually rather than automatically, to defragment the Windows 7 drive. There is at least one third-party defragmenter on the Win 7 drive, in System Mechanic, but I don’t know how it stacks up against the dedicated competition, and Diskeeper is one of the best.

Thanks for the help,

Peter

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I have some additional information, which I hope is reliable, about Microsoft 7 N, for those of us who are in a position to install it.

I was grumbling about such third-party applications as Download Studio and others not working under Windows 7 N, which didn’t sound right since they work for me under Windows 7 RTM (with updates, of course), and one error message that came up a number of times that the absence of certain dll files were the reason an application would not work. I already had IE8 installed, so I installed Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center (which come together in a single download) and to all appearances the missing dlls came with them. At any rate, and for whatever reason, I now have third-party programs that wouldn’t work before working as they should.

If that is the source of the problem, and I am in no position to confirm or confute it, then members and friends in the EU might find it to be a useful lead. I hate it when familiar and useful programs decide not to work or appear to be incompatible when there is a simple workaround.

Conspiracy theories are entertaining, but that is something that neither the EU regulators nor Microsoft themselves may not have thought of. Third-party software uses dlls they expect to find on the computer, and if they aren’t there the software won’t work.

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Hi Folks,
I have been dual booting since Windows 98.

I make a point of partitioning my hard drives so my OS is on the C drive and my data/programs/downloadz
are on a separate partition.

Yes I misspell Downloads so that any cleaning process does not remove my downloadz that I intend to save.

In the old days I used hard drive bays/enclosures to be able to swap drives after cloning drive 1 to drive 2.
I had 4 enclosures and 2 racks in my computers.

With the advent of USB hard drives I now just clone my OS from drive 1 to backup onto drive 2
(my computers have a 250gig drive 1 and a 500gig drive 2)

This computer made for Vista has Vista on the C drive (drive 1)
on the D (date named) partition I have data/programs/downloadz.

Vista is backed up via Acronis True Image to (drive 2) partition U (backup named)

Windows 7 Clean install is installed on Drive 2 (Win7 named) partition C (Win7 named)
It is backed up with Windows 7 imaging program on Drive 1 partition W (win7bu named)

I’m able to read any of my documents/photos or Downloadz files with either OS.
I’m able to install any of the programs I have in Downloadz into either OS.

Both of the OS backups are also backed up to my 1TB USB external drive with is only
plugged in to do backups.

One of the most important steps I have found is that most installation problems
occur on update installations.

I made a web page of the tech-net links to the various install options
and migration features

Mike’s Win7 links
http://tinyurl.com/MikesWin7-links

Mike the mod

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