Classic British Flight Sim

Ok guys I have installed W7 on my PC, I did it by disconnecting my C drive which holds XP ( so nothing was buggered up) then formatting a spare drive in the PC and installed W7 on that.
all works fine and W7 looks at first glance promising. I then powered down reconnected the C drive but every time I power up it does not give any option of XP or W7 it just starts W7, the XP drive is showing in My Computer.
What have I done wrong

(PS W7 recognises my CPU as an ACPI 4 core so I know in my previous post about this it is a XP problem)

I'm very tempted to say RTFM Tony

You've gone about it the wrong way I'm afraid. You need to leave your original XP drive in place, then boot from the DVD and do a custom install and tell it to install on the second (D?) drive. This will update the boot loader on the C disk to give you the options of either XP on the C drive or 7 on the D drive. The way you have done it there is know way the install routine for 7 can know that you have XP as the drive is detached.

Yes I agree with you Ben, the only reason I did it this way I was told it can bugger up your XP. Ok so I unistall W7 and then reinstall with XP still on, will it leave XP alone???
Also will it find all the drivers for video motherboard sound etc from the C drive (xp) or will I have to reinstall everything??
Cheers Tony

I don't necessarily agree Ben. The way Tony installed was identical to the way I did it recently except I installed Vista and XP not W7 and XP. First time through I did it the way you suggested and the XP install buggered the Vista (which I installed first) boot sector, which I then had to repair. In the end I reinstalled XP with the Vista drive disconnected. Neither op system "saw" the other during installation and yet I get an option from the BIOS to select which one to boot. Maybe it's dependant on the motherboard type/manufacturer.

Tony, have you tried changing the boot order of the disk drives in the BIOS? Other than that the F12 option during boot should allow you to select the drive, therefore the opsys, that you want to use.

Andy

Hi Andy
Re boot order, I have 3 sata drives and no option of boot order. I have xp on sata 0 and W7 on sata 2. I thought of that but could not see a boot option.
Hope I can get it working as it looks promising but dont want to lose Xp.

Hi Tony,

I've just looked in your mobo manual. There is an option (same as for mine) under Advanced BIOS Features called Hard Disk Boot Priority. If you hit enter on that option it allows you to specify the order in which the BIOS looks at the disks for the op system. The next 3 options down are for the device priority; on my system first is CDROM, second Hard Disk and the third is empty as I have no floppy drive on the system.

Andy

Cheers Andy
Yes your right. I just tried F12 and I managed to select XP and it booted just fine, I then tried Win7 and that also then booted fine. Now I just have to reinstall all the drivers and I am dual O/S
Thanks for your help on this
Cheers Tony

Thats not a dual boot system guys, but if it works for you both, then great

Yunno.. when Tony first posted this question, no one had replied and my first thought was the reason it's not dual booting is because the one OS doesn't know that the other OS is there as it was installed on it's own. I didn't make a reply because I didn't want to make myself look a pr@t.. again The usual scenario is to boot from the CDROM then let the install routine check your system and offer a place for the new OS to go.

The way it's been done now is less elegant but I'd guess is a safer.. more robust way to do it. There may be pitfalls but aren't there always ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Yes I agree its not really a dual OS however I did not want to mess up XP so now I have it set to boot everytime into XP incase wifey and daughter use it as they will moan! I just change the boot priority to Win 7 when I want to its a very simple thing to do.
Cheers guys
btw Amazon are now selling win7 (when released) at £75!