Dual boot Win 9 preview and Win 8

badrobot · 07 Sep 2014

Yeah, I know. I myself have 8 spinners (not counting 4-80GBs). 6 are in active use on PCs, external storage drives and NAS.

Clam · 09 Sep 2014

CountMike said:

None of the above, never stick some untried OS on the same disk or dual boot with your main one. I have seen to many doing that with Win7 and Win 8 Beta or even RC that at some point didn't have to redo everything. Separate disk, choosing OS thru BIOS fast menu or a Virtual disk are only ways to go.

I have no idea where you've seen many people having such issues. I don't recall the time when Windows (X) Beta version was so corrupted that it would ruin other Windows data, and I've tried quite a few, especially Windows 7 very early ones. Unless data was harmed, I don't see why dual boot is a dangerous choice, since you can easily recover whatever needs to be recovered, as long as it hasn't been corrupted/deleted/tampered with.

I might be wrong obviously, but I really don't think any version, including earliest public ones will be buggy enough to crash your entire system, both partitions and overall, entire HDD.

badrobot · 09 Sep 2014

Clam said:

I have no idea where you've seen many people having such issues. I don't recall the time when Windows (X) Beta version was so corrupted that it would ruin other Windows data, and I've tried quite a few, especially Windows 7 very early ones. Unless data was harmed, I don't see why dual boot is a dangerous choice, since you can easily recover whatever needs to be recovered, as long as it hasn't been corrupted/deleted/tampered with.

I might be wrong obviously, but I really don't think any version, including earliest public ones will be buggy enough to crash your entire system, both partitions and overall, entire HDD.

It can be a disaster. Especially if you are just drive testing a beta OS. Anything can get screwed up. Key word "boot manager". But if you know what you are doing, you may be okay.

If you've been reading a lot lately, you may have read somewhere that even the recent Windows 8.1 updates are screwing up the entire system. Now think about beta OS updates.

CountMike · 10 Sep 2014

Keep in mind that I started with Alpha version, just as I did with Win95. I have seen it on a friends computer (he was somehow connected to MS regional office and got a copy pretty early). Worked pretty good on his one HDD computer and had almost daily updates. I liked it from the word GO and installed it as dual boot with Win7 on a separate drive but started getting problems with permissions on W7 drive. Even after taking W8 drive out, problems with W7 continued and only full W7 installation cured it. Beta I installed on a HDD without other drives present and booted thru BIOS fast boot menu and had much less problems. Consumer Preview was almost perfect and didn't cause any more problems than full version.
So it's much better to keep them separate than to have problems.

theog · 01 Oct 2014

No problems with UEFI Dual boot Windows 8/8.1 & 10.