Dual Boot--XP and Windows 7

On a new hard drive, freshly formatted, I would like to install Windows XP Pro (I have the disks), and Win 7 RC.

What is the best way to create a dual-boot system like that? Which OS should be installed first?

Thanks.

 

Why do you need XP in the first place?

 

I currently have a XP32/W7 setup. Its a good combination for office/personal use.

Firstly set up your partitions. Give each OS at least 50gb of drive space, use the rest for General storage for both OS's

You HAVE to install XP first then W7. Rule of thumb is always install oldest OS to newest.

Once you install W7, it will overwrite the XP bootloader and you can choose which OS you want to use.

 

Do you mean to make 50GB partitions for each of the two OSes, and only put the OSes on those two partititions, and the programs and other storage on a third partition?

Or--do programs have to be installed twice, if they might be used with either OS, installed separately from each OS, into a different location?

 

Say you have a 1TB HD

50gb for XP
50gb for Windows 7

900gigs for general storage, which can easily be accessed by both OS's

Yes you will need to install the programs twice for each OS, but i found that some .exe programs will work if you run it from the other OS's Program files folder.

 

In general programs need to be installed on each OS. There are very few instances where an installed program can run independent of the OS it was installed on. Basically, only programs that run as a stand-alone .exe can be run from an OS other than the one it was installed on.

I would make each OS partition larger to accommodate installing programs on each, then keep one shared partition for data (documents, pictures, music, videos, etc).

 

Steam + steam games work fine, you just need to run Steam.exe and it will ask you to install the service so it can write on the registry of your new OS. This really saved me from having to re-install all my games for W7. You loose all your settings though because the registry isnt copied over from XP but a fresh new one.

But or my other games and programs, i have a seperate partition where i install them. I just run the setup file of each program but reinstalled it to the exact same directory. This allowed the new OS to have registry files, services and whatnot for the program to run.

This saved me from having to install twice for each OS and taking up twice as much space. I cant guarantee it will work all programs though

 

Wow, I didn't know that about Steam! That's really useful, thanks for sharing that.

I've had mixed results when I tried doing what you did - install the same program in different OS's to the same directory. Some worked, some didn't for whatever reason. HDD is cheap so I just install everything separately now. Plus, I basically use one OS the whole time and have the other as a backup, so I don't need to install much on my secondary OS.