TechTips - Dual Boot Windows 7 and XP Easily

I just got Windows 7 installed and of course the first thing I wanted to do was re-install XP just as a backup in case I needed its reliability. So far I have been more than happy with Windows 7 Ultimate but I like to have my safety net XP on hand. In this article I will show you how to setup and dual boot Windows 7 and XP if you already have Windows 7 installed.

One thing I want to explain is how the dual boot process works, once both OS's are installed you will be given a prompt each time you reboot your machine that will ask you which OS you want to load. You will have two options when you boot (Winows 7 and Windows XP).

So for those of you who just bought a new computer with Windows 7 on it and want to load XP as well here is what you are going to do.

First you will want to click the start button, find Computer and then right click on Computer, you will choose Manage from the drop down menu. This will open your computer management window and in here you need to choose the Disk Management option under storage. You will right click on the drive you want to shrink and choose Shrink Volume. Windows will check out the space and see how much you can shrink the volume. This will depend on how full your hard drive is, mine is a 120 gig hard drive and Windows 7 and all my files are taking up about 60GB, so I am able to shrink the drive up to 60GB, I do this by typing the space amount in MB (1000MB = 1GB about technically its 1024 but you don't have to be exact) so I typed in 60,000MB and then hit Shrink. Windows will shrink the volume and then it will show up with a new portion that is labeled (unallocated space this is where we will install XP).

Now put your XP disk in the CD/DVD drive and reboot your machine (make sure the CD/DVD drive is set to be first in the boot order in your BIOS). You should be prompted to press any key to boot from CD or DVD, hit any key and then you will go through the installation of XP.

Here are the quick and easy install options you will encounter.

1. Welcome to setup - press Enter

2. Agreement - press F8

3. Select partition - Choose the un-partitioned space with the up down arrows (we created, there will also be a windows 7 in the list) click Enter when its highlighted

4. Size of partition - should be set to all the space click Enter

5. Partition created - Now you will see New Partition make sure its highlighted and click Enter

6. Format? - Choose Format with NTFS (quick) and click Enter

7. It will format - After this go through all the setup of XP as you normally would have in the past

8. Finish installing XP

Once XP is installed you will want to install all the updates but before you do this you have to fix the boot loader. You can do this by downloading and installing EasyBCD a free program that is a simple to use boot loader editor. Basically we want to stop XP from destroying the Windows 7 boot file and also make XP available in the boot list. To do this you will run EasyBCD and will click on the button Add/remove Entries. There is a list of tabs at the bottom of the window and the first one is Windows, click the drop down and make sure that you select Windows NT/2K/XP/2K3 and then name it accordingly (this will show up when you boot windows so make it recognizable, typically Windows XP or something like that). Now click ADD Entry, you will see your new entry right below your Windows 7 entry in the window above. Don't forget to click the save button after you have done all of this.

Now one more step and you will be booting into XP or Windows 7. Click the Manage Boot Loader button and choose Reinstall the Vista Bootloader and then click Write MBR, you can close the program, reboot and you should now be prompted with two options Windows 7 and Windows XP, you can highlight which ever you want to load and hit enter. Whichever you choose will load, but if you don't choose one within 30 seconds or so it will default to your primary OS, most likely Windows 7.

One last thing you should probably do is stop XP from deleting your Windows 7 restore points. Every time you boot into XP it will delete your Windows 7 restore points, but there is a quick registry edit that will prevent this.

When booted into XP go to Start click Run and type in regedit and hit enter, this will open your registry and make sure you are careful in here it can be very dangerous if you edit things you aren't supposed to. Go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices, right-click on MountedDevices and choose New and then Key, type in Offline and hit enter. Now in the right hand window of the Offline key right click and choose New and then DWORD(32-bit) value. Now for the name of the new DWORD type \DosDevices\E: and hit Enter, the E: could change it has to be the value of your Windows 7 drive, so if it's D, E, F or so on change this accordingly. Then finally all you have to do is set the value of your newly created DWORD to a 1 which hides the drive from XP.

Now you can reboot XP for the changes to take affect and now you should have a good dual booting Windows 7 / XP machine. To test reboot your PC and it should come to a screen asking you which Windows you would like to load, choose and load Windows 7 or XP which ever you want to use.

Hope this guide helps you out.