Dual Boot

[Gene E. Bloch]

Hi RC,

Thank You for the explanations of assigning drive letters by Vista and
Windows 7. I prefer to install Windows 7 by option 2,that you mentioned in
last post.
I prefer to install each OS on their own drive,even though I have each drive
partioned in two. I always back up my files,but with each OS being on a
seperate hard drive and say a drive should fail,I still have a good
opersting system on the other drive.I could make an image of each drive,but
prefer not to take up the space on a partition. .

The backup images should be on *separate* external drives, not on the
drives in the computer.

For a guide to my reasoning, consider that you have partition C: with the
OS, D: for whatever you like, and let's say H: for backup, all on a single
drive. Suppose what fails is not partition C:, but the whole drive. Then H:
is of no help. If instead H: was on an external USB or other drive, you
will still be able to create a new C: partition from it.

 

[Canuck57]

You cannot install two OSes on the same drive, they must be on different
drives.

Incorrect. You can install at least 4. Create 4 partitions, one each.

Just because Microsoft installers are often brain dead garbage, doesn't
mean you can't work around it. Say you have a OEM Vista install hog,
wants the whole disk. Fine, install it. Then reduce the OS disk space
to make room for a friendly install of Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD
or whatever.

And then there is also the VMWare and VirtualBox options.