Originally posted by: Golferdude1977
I have two physical drives, one has XP 32 bit, drive C, and I am wanting to load WIndows 7 64 bit on the other physical drive, drive D. Should this be done with XP running or should I boot up the computer with WIndows 7 disk?
THanks,
Jimmy
I'd like to extend this question a bit, if I may. I currently have one physical drive with XP installed. I purchased another drive to install Win7 on. When I plugged in the new drive to play around with Win7, I unplugged the XP drive, so there was only one physical drive running (just in case things got weird... I have some older equipment and I wanted to play it extra safe, even after a back up).
What I'd like to do is have a dual boot into Win7 and XP, one from each drive. Here's the plan so far:
1) Hook up Win7 drive and select that as the priority HD drive in BIOS to boot from.
2) Hook up XP drive as secondary drive.
3) Boot from Win7 DVD and perform a repair so I can set up a dual boot.
From everything I've read so far, I understand that Win7 will automatically detect the Win7 install I just did and the old XP install on the second physical drive and allow me to set those two OS up for a dual boot. Though it is possible that I will need to reinstall Win7 on the new HD while the XP drive is hooked up. That's not a big deal.
What I'd like to know is that if I need to, after setting up a dual boot as described above, would it be possible to remove the Win7 drive and plug in just the XP drive and boot to XP as if Win7 and the other drive never existed? Or does installing Win7 and setting up a dual boot somehow change the XP install on the physical drive, thus requiring me to reinstall XP?
I'm hoping all the dual boot information would be on the Win7 drive and if I unplug that drive the XP drive would be none the wiser and would just load up, per usual. I'm worried that all this might do something funky to the XP install though.
Any advice would be helpful.
Thanks!