Creating dual boot system for Vegas 32bit, 64bit

CClub wrote on 9/4/2009, 9:40 AM
I'm just about to create a dual bootup, as I'm upgrading components to a whole new i7 system. I'm planning on creating two partitions on a hard drive: one keeping my current XP OS/Vegas setup and the other just set aside for the new Windows 7. I'm then going to install a whole new i7 motherboard/processor/RAM system and then re-attach the hard drive just mentioned. Once that fires up, I was going to create the dual bootup... one for my current XP setup and the other for the upcoming Windows 7.

I'm just wondering if anyone has done this already. I've upgraded whole new systems before, but when I did so, I just re-installed everything from scratch. This time, I was hoping to just re-attach the hard drive and away I go. Does anyone see a problem with this process?

Comments

ddm wrote on 9/4/2009, 10:09 AM
A couple things... If you reattach your old xp setup to a new motherboard, depending on the hard drive chipset, you will likely get a blue screen of death, dead in the water error. You can usually fix this by booting from your xp disk and doing a "repair" installation, that will keep all your settings the same as before. If the new system does boot up, if your hard drive chipset is the same, then you will be able to boot up and xp will find a boatload of new devices and go about installing them. Usually several restarts later, you'll be up and running.

As far as dual booting, I much prefer getting separate hard drives and controlling the booting from your motherboards bios. I find it much cleaner than doing a dual boot on one drive and dealing with a partition manager. a bit safer, too, if one hard drive dies, you're still up and running with the other system. I've been using this type of setup for quite a while on several systems and I find it easy to manage and easy to try other operating systems.
srode wrote on 9/4/2009, 11:53 AM
I would just do a clean installation - if you have all your applications organized it shouldn't take that much time - I always save dowloaded programs in a special folder just for setting up a system on a separate drive so I can just start running the installations after the fresh system is up and running. Add a disk when Win7 comes out in October. A clean installation will run better most likely.
smashguy37 wrote on 9/4/2009, 2:58 PM
Definitely do a clean install. I installed a new mobo a few months ago and XP worked fine for about a month until one day it wouldn't boot up. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong and then I had to go through lengthy process of typing in lines of code into DOS or something so I could get back into XP and wipe the drive.
CClub wrote on 9/4/2009, 7:30 PM
I'm very glad I posted this, and thanks for the responses. Separate disks does make much more sense. And I agree about the clean install... sounds like a good idea. Thanks much for the feedback.
ritsmer wrote on 9/5/2009, 12:28 AM
Just to hit the head of the nail once more: Here I have 4 internal drives installed. Did clean build on a new HDD when adding Windows 7 and kept XP Prof on its old drive.
When running XP or Win 7 only the 2 "C" drives change their names (called "C" and "X") all the other disks and partitions have the same names (D,E,F,G) under both XP and Win 7.
This makes a quick change of OS easy as both the installed Vegas's and the .vegs always refers to the same D,E,F and G drives.

Also the same folders are kept shared under both OS so that the machine looks the same -media and data- from outside through the housenet.