Windows 10 & XP dual boot. Best way?

I certainly can't say I have any objection since that's your own choice to make there as far as what OS(s) you decide to run! All anyone else can do here is make observations on what is possible.

I still have to see if I will able to get 98 Second Edition running on a VM again! Forget 3.1 or 95 at this time since the first of the 6 floppy set is DOA as well as not able to make a bootable floppy image to work as needed since the old Legacy needed a boot disk! 98 however had made just a wee bit more progress where you can get that one to run at times. I had the full version for that while the 95 cd was only an upgrade disk to move up from 3.1 many moons ago!

The early floppies were actually only 750gb or 1.2mb since you had differences in capacities seen floppy first came to being and then moved onto the smaller sized 1.44mb once the technology improved a bit. I still kept some screens from the VM projects for 3.1 and 98SE to look at however. Before 7 I had one W3.1 VM going on XP at one point.



Back then the free version of VM Player was VLite or VLiteWorkstation until changed sometime later to VM Player as seen with 7 beta running VMs.



That one was seen before the idea of additional Quick Launch toolbars was introduced over at SevenForums! You see the desktop clutter and note the 7 beta watermark in the lower right corner there.



I also had another classic of the XP Mode along side XP Home along side 98SE! Three VMs running at once! The problem however was ending up running out resources when only having 4gb of memory on the old Vista build! Shortly following the retail launch back then came the Antec 900-1 replacement when the supply flaked and took the board along with it on that old 2007 build! Later I went with the newer Antec 900-2 case and put a new board with the cpu I swapped out to pass along to someone who never ran 7! He got into an 8.1 laptop right after he bought his own 7 Pro and still hasn;t run 7 yet! I told him since I had put in a pair of the old 500gb drives I could set him up with a 7/10 dual boot so he would be able to run both.

The key I found even for multibooting going past just having a pair of versions running together was to keep one on a separate drive the whole time. If you have to repair or replace one you won't end up needing to see the dual or multi boot done over entirely! Each stands alone on it's own bootable drive prevents the worse case of being totally down until repair or replacement of OS is seen to! The VM options still seem to end up only being temp solutions when not having the extra drive or two to work with.

martinlest said:

See how used to modern disc capacities we are!!

Tell me about it! It's been a good number of years now since I even saw a 3 1/2" floppy as far as putting it into any floppy drive! That was the Windows 3.1 disk set I still have in an old tray type case that once had seen the drawer full. Actually I still have the two single drawer cases but since use them for odds and ends besides a few 3 1/2s along with the 3.1 set. The Vista case later to become the 7 beta to RC case and onto the retail 7 initially until supply took out board! saw the old old stuff being tried out while trying 7 out at the same time!

And that wasn't 750kb but 720kb for the smaller size 5.25" floppy we used to simply "5 and a quarter" for 5 1/4" replaced afterwards by the double density 1.44mb which became the widely accepted. The first was actuallly the 200mm size or about 8' in width if you look it up. Floppy disk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And it's not only the disk capacity that saw an increase but how much memory could be used on an old system! For the early Windows the Himem.sys was the key ingredient for the first widely available Windows 3.0 saw a 16mb limit while the updated driver brought in by 3.1 in theory not real life was 512mb to be cut in half by the actual 256mb pratical limit! 98SE saw a 500mb boundry and would stall when you reached the 512mb mark! Had to run either a 256mb simm along with a single 128mb or put in three 128s to see 448mb total on a 486 flat top desktop case. The IBM 386 before that only saw 16mb! And people cried at 4gb only seeing 3.12gb on XP and 3.571gb approx on Vista? due to the limitations of the 32bit kernel when the 16bit had even more! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/84388

But that was going back in the 90s there! The present theory for the max on the 64bit Windows would be about 128gb instead of 128mb you might see on some old boat anchor artifact in the Museum of PC History. And what was the average cpu speed back then? Try an old 386 at 33mhz and the next 486 running at 66mhz! Try going from that to the 3.6ghz the present quad core cpu runs at! Left the "Slow boat to China" in the dust a long time ago!

Hi again! This is now a Windows 7 issue, but I am posting a link here to my problem (as posted in the Win7 forum). If anyone who has been helping here over the past few weeks could kindly continue to do so, I'd be grateful! (Please reply of course in the Win7 thread).

Many thanks!

Dual boot Win7/XP not working - Windows 7 Help Forums

I replied there with a few links including the tutorial over at SF for setting up a dual boot of XP with 7 you should look over carefully since you did what was going to happen when putting XP on last and trashing the 7 mbr! I can tell you the guide there will bail you out of a tuff situation for sure!

Likewise when trying to set up the dual boot here between 10 and 7 I couldn't add a boot entry into the 7 BCD for 10 like you were not able to add 7 into the XP boot.ini file and see working results. It's been some time since I even installed XP on any system let alone one of my builds except for a VM! Besides that and the XP Mode once I moved on from Vista into 7 XP was dead issue for me back then except for helping a friend out or setting up an old case.

I actually forgot to mention that when installing XP last you should have unplugged the 7 drive temporarily as you would for any newer version to avoid trashing the newer version's boot. Once the older version is on you can then add a new boot entry in for it using the latest version of EasyBCD which would be needed for 10! The BCD store in each version from Vista up still works in the same manner but with each newer seeing a slight chance that once you have gone past one or two versions newer you won't be able to the boot entry for the newer into the previous version's own.

When previously setting up a 7/8 Customer Preview dual boot nothing but headaches from disk errors on both OS drives! With 10's Tech Preview that never saw any physical install but only a VM at the start of the year due to having other matters to tend to. But EasyBCD works like a champ on 10 as well as on 7 remember if you later decide to move on from XP! And the 32bit flavor of 7 will run a great deal of older XP programs that wouldn't even go on Vista! Just another tip to pass along.