Can I Run A Dual Boot System With Xp And Win 7?

[bapak]

Can I run a dual boot system with XP and Win 7? Need to use to instruct students in the use of both operating systems.

[bankruatsteve]

Sure. Put on separate drives (or partition). You will need LOTS of disk for that. Then use BIOS to choose startup.

[Crushdepth]

I found installing Windows 7 or XP both blew away the master boot record for the other. You can do it but you need to repair the MBR, there is a small application EasyBCD that does this easily, see the guide below depending on your situation:

http://apcmag.com/the_definitive_dualbooti..._stepbystep.htm

Good idea to make an image of your drive before you start monkeying with it so you can roll back to the original state if things go wrong.

[Beggar]

Win7 will create a boot menu where you have Win7 and WinXP. To be more precise it will look for any OS it can find on your partitions and will put it into this menu.

Just be aware that when you uninstall Win7 and want to use WinXP alone again then you have to rebuild the MBR for XP because the boot sequence for WinXP and earlier OS is completely different from Vista and Win7.

[Supernova]

Can I run a dual boot system with XP and Win 7? Need to use to instruct students in the use of both operating systems.

Dualboot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Note: To avoid unnecessary complications, always install the older operating system first (XP then Win7).

[Gary A]

Why take a chance with having two operating systems on one hard drive? New hard drives are cheap. It's a simple thing to unplug one and plug the other in. Since I really like Win 7 Pro, I have finally formatted my old Win XP Pro hard drive and now use it as a back up drive. I also have an older smaller hard drive with Ubuntu installed.

The techies will tell you it is no problem to partition and use two systems. It probably is easy if you know what you are doing, but I have had nothing but problems with partitions.

[ballbreaker]

The techies will tell you it is no problem to partition and use two systems. It probably is easy if you know what you are doing, but I have had nothing but problems with partitions.

I'm not an expert with computers and had no problems installing both on partitioned HDD.  I can select either during boot process with Win7 being default if not changed during boot process.