johns said:
I'm thinking about installing Win7 on my XP system, and I
would like to set up dual boot .. if it is safe to do so. I have
a new 2nd 500 gig hard drive, so Win7 would go on it's own
drive. I've been reading the groups, and there seems to be
some pitfalls, but I'm not sure if they are real. One poster
says that when he boots Win7, it removes all of his XP
restore points. Not good. Another poster replied and said
that was because he did not hide the XP partition from Win7.
He said you can't go over to that partition and run anything
because Win7 will then write over the XP setup. He says
any access to the XP programs, or anything will cause
big trouble.
Anybody tried this dual boot ? Can you hide the partitions
from each other ?
johns
I can see an example of a solution here, but this fixes
WinXP deleting the more modern OS restore points. This
would hide the Windows 7 volume, so WinXP can't see it.
(I don't understand, why the articles have no concerns about
the other direction. I would have thought changes could be
made to WinXP, that would cause the SR points there to be
invalidated as well.)
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/127417-system-restore-points-stop-xp-dual-boot-delete.html
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/2008/06/a-workaround-for-the-dual-boot-system-restore-bug/
"Personally, I no longer recommend dual-boot setups at all. I prefer using
Virtual PC, VMWare, or another virtualization solution to run XP in a
virtual machine under Vista. On those rare occasions when I need to test XP and
Vista on the same hardware, I swap the hard drives and access shared data files
from a server to avoid this issue."
So there is an opinion for you.
*******
One way to solve this problem, with hardware, is by using SCSI drives.
I selected the cheapest, reasonable brand I could find. You'd need a controller
card too, to connect up the drive. You can find cheap cards for it, if you
keep your eyes open. (I have a couple, but they're not ultra 320 or anything.)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148279
Then, downloaded a manual for it.
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/enterprise/cheetah/15K.5/SCSI/100384776j.pdf
On PDF page 47, it has a WP or Write Protect jumper location.
(J6 jumper block, only available on LW drive in this particular
case.) If you purchase a toggle switch, a pair of wires, and
female pins to plug onto the WP position of J6, you can have
a write protect switch mountable on the front of the computer.
If you had two SCSI drives, you could WP A and boot B, or WP B
and boot A. By making the alternate drive "read-only" with the
jumper, no worries about system restore.
Will the OS complain about finding a read-only drive ? Probably
But a hardware "gate" to prevent writing, means no kludgy software
solutions to this problem.
Your data drive can then be a large IDE, while two small SCSI drives
function as separate boot drives.
*******
With regard to running apps from a second OS, apps come in two
flavors.
1) Applications dependent on registry structures to be in place.
If a program has an installer, and the installer is the only
thing that can put the right registry structures in place, then
you *have* to use the installer. The installer might, for
example, be handling the licensing key.
2) Other applications may be designed to be portable. If you look
at a lot of stuff on Sysinternals.com , the programs there are
portable. You could boot an alternate OS, and execute one of them.
If you installed Firefox in WinXP, then booted Windows 7 and ran it,
Firefox does a runtime install of its "Profile" folder. So programs
can and do install things at runtime. But they may also have good
reason, to be adding structures via the installer. There is at least
one other folder with Firefox stuff in it, and I don't know
if that is a runtime feature or not.
Something you'd expect to be anal, would be Microsoft Office. If you
installed that on WinXP, then booted Windows 7 and double clicked
one of the .exe files, there's no way that is going to run.
Applications can be designed for portability. But, there has to be
a reason to support it. Think of the difficulties, if you design a
portable app, but need different behaviors or preferences, when
operated in Win98 versus Windows 7. In such a situation, using
the registry is the perfect solution, as it is a "per-OS" solution.
You can do it with your own preferences storage solution, but it'll
mean keeping separate settings for each OS environment used.
*******
In terms of virtual machine options, you can use VPC2007 to run an
OS within your new OS. You could run WinXP inside a separate window
with VPC2007.
Certain versions of Windows 7, support "WinXP Mode", which is a separate
copy of WinXP and its own license, with "terminal services" display
implementation. It allows a WinXP program to be "rootless", so there
isn't a box drawn around the desktop area like in VPC2007. Each WinXP
mode application launched, opens a window as if it was displaying native
in Windows 7. But the window is a Terminal Services window.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Mode#Windows_XP_Mode
Your existing OS can be virtualized as well, lock, stock and barrel.
Try this for example. When "pulled into a virtual machine", the hardware
environment is entirely different. The OS will need to be re-activated,
against the new hardware. If you have a Dell, obviously the license key
issue is going to be an issue. If you have a non-royalty OEM install,
as long as you haven't done an install lately, you might get away with it.
I've tested this, but didn't activate it (I disconnected the network
cable while testing). This even has a feature, to correct the HAL
option, to account for the multicore original environment, to single
core VPC2007 environment differences. I think it's an amazing utility,
considering it did the job without issues. (I've tried other recipes
that failed.) You run the resulting .vhd file, in a VPC2007 virtual
machine. That would allow you to run the programs used in that OS,
without physically having to reinstall them.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Those two examples of virtual environments are no good for games,
but are OK for other more serious kinds of work. I tried another
virtual environment the other day, but it was a "flaky pastry"
and not even worth mentioning.
Paul
