Dual boot XP and Win 7

I followed the advice from Lifehacker for dual booting XP and Win 7. Everything went fine and all is working well and way better than expected considering that my laptop is about four years old. I'm really impressed with Win 7's speed and it's ability to fix all driver realated issues I had after the install. I have an older ATI graphics card which for some reason I thought wouldn't support the Aero eye candy but I was wrong because it all works well and fast. This dual booting is all new to me and I kind of think that somethings not right, so I have some questions. I downloaded the Win 7 install from Microsoft which was done through their download manager. The download was saved to an external USB drive. I only have one drive/partition C: which had XP installed on it and I use the USB external drive for downloads and backup. I launched the Win 7 setup file on the USB drive from within XP and Win 7 did it's thing and all is well. XP is installed on C: system drive and Win 7 installed to E:. Now here is some of the things I'm unsure about

1)When I boot up, I get the Win 7 boot manager which gives three options of Earlier version of windows, Windows 7, Recovery Console. If I select Windows 7 it starts Win 7 boot screen and boots into Win 7. If I select Earlier version of windows, it goes to XP's bootloader screen with the option to select Windows XP or Recovery Console. My question here, Is selecting Earlier version of windows suppose to take me to the XP bootloader screen? I'm assuming yes since there are two options in XP for boot up which are XP and Recovery Console.

1a) If I didn't have the two XP bootup options, meaning remove Recovery Console option, would selecting Earlier version of windows in Win 7 boot manager take me straight into XP?

2) When in either XP or Win 7, I can see the drive/partition of each others drive, meaning when in C: XP's explorer, I can see and access Win 7's E: drive. Is this normal? Some how I was under the impression that each OS and drive were hidden from one another within explorer but as I said, this dual booting is new to me.

3) This one is not mentioned in the title but I use Eaz-Fix and now have it installed on both OS's,lol or I think I do. I noticed that taking a snapshot in Win 7, it shows up in XP. Eaz-Fix says that both drives C: (XP) and E: (7) are being protected. What would happen if I restored the as of now one and only snapshot which was taken from within Win 7? Would it restore things on XP or just Win 7? My thinking was that XP would contain it's own snapshots to restore only in XP and Win 7 would contain it's own snapshots that would only restore to Win 7 but now I really don't know for sure. I did label the one and only snapshot as having been taken in Win 7 just in case each OS would restore to their respective drives.

I can give more detail if needed. I'm imaged and backed up and am not beyond a do over if need be. Even though everything seems to be working quite well, when all of the questionable issues(to me) above came to mind, I'm having doubts now as to whether I've done this correct or not. I will say this, even though I go through the two different boot screens in order to get into XP, my boot up time into XP has dropped to about two thirds of the time it used to take.

 

For dual or triple booting take a look at this site: neosmart.net/forums.
They are the experts on the subject.
They helped me with my triple boot system.
Good luck

 

(1) Yes, earlier version of Windows means pre-Vista version of Windows, which can be Windows 2000 or XP. The wording "Earlier version of Windows" can be changed by using bcdedit, which is a Microsoft command line utility. You can changed it to Windows XP Professional or Windows XP 32-bit as you like. If you want to, I can show you how to do it.

If you have a previous dual boot of XP 32-bit and XP x64, you will have a sub-boot menu for XP 32-bit and XP x64

(1a) I don't understand what you refer to as "two XP bootup options", could you post a screenshot?

(2) It is normal. No OS would hide itself. You can browse any partition freely in any OS.

(3) I don't use Eaz-Fix but I know it is a backup software by doing a search in google. I can't follow what you mentioned, but I know your XP is in C and Win7 in E. If you have installed Eaz-Fix in both OS and you have chosen to cover or take care of "all" partitions in Eaz-Fix, you will be protected for all partitions. I don't know how Eaz-Fix operates, but if Eaz-Fix would only take care of the partition where the OS resides, you will only be protected in the OS you are using.

 

Ok, it appears I did better than what I thought. Not being familiar with this, I read as much as possible before plunging in. I also had a desktop pc with instructions pulled up close by for reference but just had second doubts as to whether I did it right. Your two screenshots are what I get. I get the first screenshot where I select Earlier version of windows which I have edited to say "Microsoft Windows XP", when I select that, I get your second screenshot which has the choice of "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" as default and below that I have "Windows Recovery Console". So, from what you have told me it appears I'm normal. The Eaz-Fix thingy has to be right as well but can be tested easily by leaving a useless file on the desktop of XP and restoring the user snapshot that I have taken from within Win 7. I assume since all drives are being protected the option to restore would be accesible from either OS in case something serious went wrong in one or the other OS. But on the other hand it doesn't make sense because I've always restored from the sub system console and not within Windows itself. So I guess making snapshots need to be very well noted as to which OS they came from, if that's the case. I hope it is anyway because if not, Eaz-Fix has just become useless for me if restoring a snapshot restores info/data in both OS 's. I have two more questions,

1) my drive C: (XP) is not accessible from within drive E: which is Win 7. It's shown in explorer but not accessible. Does this have to do with security permissions or is this normal?

2) I have SRP setup in XP, I notice that Win 7 Professional has SRP also. Are the two independent of one another? One would think so but I haven't implemented it in Win 7 yet do to the warning it gave when I began to activate it. I think it said that it would overide or delete all other policies or something to that effect. My thoughts at the time were, there are none since I haven't set it up yet but then the red flag went up about it being setup in XP which is my reason for making sure before doing it. I may have got the same warning in XP when I set it up but can't remember back.

 

For (1), it looks strange. Do you login to Windows 7 as an Administrator or other user accounts? I have created the big A Administrator account and I can view other partitions as I like. Just to remind that there are two administrator accounts in Vista and Windows 7. One is the big A and the other is the small letter a. The big A is the ultimate Administrator account and the small letter administrator is a super account. You can try this by creating a Administrator account and see if you can then browse the contents of your drive C. You can find the steps here. Because I always use the big Administrator account throughout, I have no idea if there are restrictions for other user accounts.

I have no idea for (2) because I have no experience in using SRP. See if other experts can step into.

 

Yes its an Administrator account. Thanks Chubb for taking time with me.

 

I was wrong about Win 7 not seeing my XP C: drive. It's not allowing me access to my USB F: drive. Any ideas?

 

I have no experience in this area but I would suspect if you cannot access the "other" drive from within a particular boot then your imaging program would likely not be able to either. My first action at this point would be to contact your imaging programs support team (or forum since I believe you said you are using Macrium and I am not sure if Macriums producer provides direct support or not) and ask for guidance. Of course you could just try a restore and see what happens. Just be sure to make changes to both boots before you do the restore so you can easily see if both or only one of the systems were changed back.

 

For anybody wanting to review the dual or multi-boot loading utilities available, you might also want to check out DualBootPro from
http://www.pronetworks.org

Their forums and guides have a wealth of advice on dual-boot configurations.

 

Yes, most definitely separate from each other. BTW, the Lifehacker method of resizing (shrinking) existing O/S partitions to make room for new installation of Win 7 is odd to me. It would be better to leave the existing ones alone and hopefully have enough disk space to create a new active partition for the Win 7 install.

 

Thanks, I was fairly certain that it was and was looking for re-assurance mostly. About Lifehacker, dual booting is a foreign language to me considering I have never done it before but followed the instructions and haven't had a hiccup yet. As far as drive/partition, I only had the one internal drive C: and one external for image backups and download. I'm a couple weeks into this Win 7 and have to say I'm kinda impressed so far. I was really amazed that all the bells and whistles really worked considering this laptop is at least four years old. Win 7 managed to find and update all drivers with the exception of one and I have no idea what it is. It just yellow flags it with a generic name of system base something or other. I removed it from device manager and it stayed gone for a few days but noticed this morning when I was in 7 that it had been recognized again as having no driver. I wish I could figure out what it is.

 

It worked for you and that's most important it's just that shrinking a Windows partition tends to corrupt the Vista or XP MBR. Having said that, I see this site does the same thing, but then they use EasyBCD to repair the Vista bootloader. They even have a tutorial for the scenario where XP is installed first. In this latter case the Vista bootloader simply takes over. I've Used Easy BCD on occasion and it's a nice little utility. In Vista/Win7 it's not quite as simple as a boot.ini file. Some info on that here.