Dual Booting Vista and 7

OK I know this is a dumb question, but I've been searching and reading for the past 2 hours on this. I am upgrading my hdd and want to dual boot Windows 7 and Vista. The reason being I need Vista for work as I can't access my network drive in Windows 7. I've already talked to MS via email, but haven't called up their professional support to try to resolve that.

Anyways. My HDX16t came with Vista 64. I upgraded to Windows 7 64 when it came out. I'm thinking I will use DriveImage XML to clone the entire drive onto my new hdd twice, onto two different partitions. Then I will go into one of those partitions and activate the restore settings to restore that partition back to Vista as if straight from the factory.

Does this sound like the way to go? Is there anything else, any settings I need to change? When it boots up will it automatically ask which partition to boot to or is there a setting for that?
I found this website and read into it some. LINK.

Thanks

 

Instead of doing something so complex that probably won't work for a variety of reasons, why not just do 2 clean installs, 1 for Vista and 1 for Win7?

 

It didn't come with a Vista CD/DVD, but I did make a backup disk set. Also, I don't want to reinstall all of my programs if I don't have to under Windows 7.

 

Your lazyness will almost certainly mean more work for you in the end.

Upon reading your original post, I was immediately wondering how you're planning to recover the factory image without a recovery partition on the new drive, or how you plan to fix the MBR.

 

In its internals Vista and Win7 are pretty much the same with small differences - having both is pretty much a waste of space as far as I am concerned.

Yes, Win7 is better than Vista - but in the end you generally won't notice the difference.
(Win7: Slightly faster boot... so what? Smaller instal but less drivers on board...)

Anyway:
I suggest you keep just one OS.

If you want to use Win7 find out what is going wrong - my guess would be its some obscure setting in the network and sharing centre.
If you can live with Vista then stick with that

 

You could also run Vista as a guest VM with Windows 7 as host, provided you have the RAM to do it.

 

How do I do that.

And DetlevCM, if you had read my entire post you'd see that I need Vista for work.

 

Use a program called VirtualBox (open source) or VMware Workstation (commercial) to run a guest operating system as a program on your host operating system. From personal experience, I would recommend VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org/

 

How do you suggest I reinstall Vista if I don't have a Vista install disc. I am cloning over the recovery partition.

Thanks! Will give it a go.

 

The network drive?

There must be a solution for that - it would be strange if that were "dead" on Windows 7.

But on that premise - use only Vista?

 

Why not shrink the primary partition and make room for a new install of win 7? Then you can easily dual boot without disturbing anything and without having to run a virtual machine.

 

The network drive thing is a totally buggered issue that I won't go into here, but yes, the best solution at this point is to either revert back to Vista or dual boot Vista just for work.

Anyways, I wanted more space too thus the bigger hdd. Should have it in hand in a couple of days and things loaded up by Monday. We'll see.

 

I would reccomend having a Windows 7 virtual machine in VirtualBox. IMO, The difference between Windows Vista and Windows 7 isn't large enough to warrant a dual boot.

 

Yepp, but what small difference there is is reduced or destroyed by a virtual machine - Win7 is a bit faster - but you'd loose that in a Virtual Machine.

 

Not an issue for me. I'll get rid of the dual boot when I leave this place of employment within the year.

 

If you have a valid Vista key you can just grab any copy from anywhere to get the install disc.

 

Why would you run an inferior OS as host to a superior guest OS? Windows 7 is far better than Vista by any measure.