Dual Boot Windows 10 with Windows 7 or Windows 8  

Wow. That was so easy that now I'm almost embarrassed I asked lol. Now I just need to see about the 6 million other questions I had forgotten about since I last changed OS's.

Thank God for the Brink tutorials.

Brink said:

You're most welcome mate. Never feel embarrassed about asking questions. See my signature about that.

I don't hope I'm hi-jacking the thread (first time poster, I'm sorry if this is the wrong section to post in) but I have not been able to find an answer anywhere to this question:

What would one do to dual-boot Windows 7 and Windows 10 IF Win 10 is installed FIRST? The question in case is about a brand new laptop with Win 10 that also needs a working Win 7 install.

How do I go around this?

Brink said:

Hello Hvilsted, and welcome to Ten Forums. :)

It would depend on if you are installing Windows 7 to the same hard drive Windows 10 is installed on, or a separate hard drive.

Please post a screenshot showing the full layout of your Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) to see what options you may have.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1...en-forums.html

Thanks for the welcome! And thank you for your quick reply.

I'm not able to post a screen shot from that specific laptop for now, as I don't have it.

But I can say for sure that Win 7 will be installed on a partition on the same disk as Win 10 as it is a laptop with only one harddrive.

I thought maybe there was a guide somewhere that started out with Win 10 being installed first? I just haven't been able to Google it up.

EDIT:

Let's just say it is this laptop I'm using now:

Brink said:

Hvilsted,

It will all depend on if you will be able to shrink the drive Windows 10 is installed on from within Windows 10 to be able to create unallocated space. Sometimes you are not able to OEM PCs because of the way they setup their recovery partitions. This is the main reason for the screenshot of Disk Management to verify.

If you are not able to, then you would need to install a second hard drive to use, OR install Windows 7 in a virtual machine.

If you are able to, then you would just select the new unallocated space to install Windows 7 on like below.

So - it's that easy? Will Win 7 install not mess up Win 10 MBR?

1: Create unallocated space with Mini Tool Partition Wizard or something like that
2: Plug in bootable USB with Win 7
3: Start Win 7 installation, select unallocated space
4: Boot menu will automatically appear after install?


Thank you very much for your replies!

Brink said:

Correct, but I'd see if you could shrink the partition in Disk Management first before using a 3rd party program.

Thank you very much.