Dual-booting Windows XP and Windows 7

[ppatin]

I just got a second hard drive for my PC and am going to install Windows 7 on the new HD. From what I understand installation is fairly straightforward, and the Windows 7 bootloader will take over and give me a choice of which operating system to use when I start up the computer. Are there any quirks or potential pitfalls I should be looking out for? Also, if the HD with Windows 7 were to fail how hard would it be to restore the Windows XP bootloader?

[Steve R Jones]

No pitfalls as long as you leave the XP drive hooked up.

No very hard to fix the XP bootloader if you wanted to get rid of Win 7.

This little gem will help:

VistaBootPRO - BCDEdit.exe Made Easy
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

[Ubon94]

I'm dual booting XP and W7 using Easy BCD on a single hard drive ..I put W7 on a differ partition....It's be great! except everytime u boot up it auto default to W7 even u tell it to point to XP..

W7 boots up fast but now my XP is booting up slow even since i had W7 installed.. I make me feel like W7 reserved RAM for it self and Xp has to reload everything from scratch when booting up..

[ppatin]

Did the install, so far everything runs fine. Haven't had a lot of time to play around with Windows 7 to see how it works, but I was able to get back into XP without any problems.

[ppatin]

I've had one issue crop up that I was wondering if anyone could help me with. I normally use a USB keyboard, and when the Windows bootloader comes up the keyboard does not work. I have an old PS/2 keyboard that I was able to plug in instead and if I use that it's fine, but I was wondering if there was some way to get a USB keyboard to work in the bootloader.

[Steve R Jones]

Look in the BIOS and enable/turn on Legacy USB Support.

[ppatin]

Thanks, that did it.