How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with Windows Vista!

Posted by Ron ||

July 27, 2009 ||

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Windows 7 is the latest from Microsoft’s incredibly successful stable of operating systems, barring the aberration called Windows Vista. Vista was a failure from every side, be it marketing or functionality; everything except maybe the way it looks and some minute security enhancements, which frankly, did not necessitate the creation of a new OS.

Microsoft tried every trick in and out of the book to boost Vista sales but to no avail.Things were so bad that the market preferred to continue using the immensely popular XP rather than shell out a lot of money for an upgrade that was not worth it.

Various aspects contributed to Vista’s failure; the outrageous amount of code, its resource hogging nature, lack of sufficient drivers etc were just some of them. Windows 7 comes as a successor to Vista and Microsoft promises that it will not repeat the same mistakes that Vista did.

Users who want to check out the new OS can download the beta version and see for themselves. One way to install Windows 7 is to format your hard disk and remove your existing OS and install the new one.

But there are other options for those who do not want to stop using their current operating system. One such option is that you can create a partition on your hard drive and install windows 7 on this partition and thus create the option of booting from either operating system.

Now, creating a formatted partition is a simple affair in Vista. Select the start button and type “diskmgmt.msc” into the “search” option. This will lead to the opening of a “disk management” window. The window provides you with information on the disk drives in the computer.

Right-click on the appropriate disk and select “shrink volume”. Windows 7 has a recommended hard disk size of at least 16GB, but the actual requirement would be much higher. So select the maximum possible value for shrinking the volume that you can afford. After completing this, we can observe that the volume by which you shrunk the disk is available as a separate partition.

Name this partition as you wish by right-clicking on it and selecting the appropriate option. After this has been done, right- click on the newly created volume yet again. Select the “new simple volume” option and select the appropriate settings for the new partition (specifying volume capacity- it should be the entire volume, formatting the new volume with NTFS file system option etc).

Creating a new partition in machines that use XP is problematic, unless you were intelligent enough to foresee the release of a new operating system and wanted to be prepared for it, at the time of installation of XP. We can create partitions at the time of XP’s installation but would have to resort to third party software to create one after the installation.

There are many such softwares available such as Partition Magic and Gparted, and creating a new partition using this software is similar to the process described before for vista.. One can download the ISO of the Gparted software, burn it into a disc and then install it from there. Make sure that the new partition created is a ‘primary’ partition (an option that has to be selected when creating the partition using Gparted or Partition Magic).

Our next step in the process would be the download of the beta version of windows 7. Click here to initiate download and burn the downloaded ISO into a dvd.

After this, insert the dvd into your drive, boot from the disk and begin installation of Windows 7 following the simple installation wizard instructions.

Please note that when asked to select the type of installation, you select the “custom(advanced)” option and select the partition created by you earlier for installation. Selecting the wrong partition would lead to Windows 7 being installed OVER your existing Vista or XP OS and subsequent loss of data.

The rest of the installation procedure is pretty simple and similar to that of XP and Vista. By the end of it, we will be able to observe a boot screen where you can select either Windows 7 or your already existing XP or Vista OS. Let us hope that the final product is as good as Microsoft claims it to be.

Tags: dual boot windows, Dual Boot Windows 7, partition magic, windows 7, Windows 7 Installation

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