Dual Boot with XP and Windows 7

I'm running into some issues and I wanted to switch over to dual boot. Right now Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit is installed. I was going to reformat, install win xp, and then win 7. Is it pretty much straight forward or is there something special I need to know/do?

Why do you want to reformat the drive? You could simply shrink the current volume that you have on your win7 install and install XP onto that.

But ya its pretty much a straight shot

benj1290 said:

Why do you want to reformat the drive? You could simply shrink the current volume that you have on your win7 install and install XP onto that.

But ya its pretty much a straight shot

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I have one 1.5TB HDD partitioned into two drives. If I were to shrink the current drive and go from there, where will the "new" drive be located? In the "middle" of the C and D or at the end? Will this have any adverse effects on the performance of the drive? eg load times or speed?

You'll likely have to re-build the bootloader if you install XP after W7 as the XP bootloader will overwrite the W7 bootloader, and XP knows nothing about W7...

This should be as simple as installing XP, then going back and "reparing" the W7 bootloader - it should discover that the bootloader is missing and create a new one that will list XP and W7 (you might have to use something like "VistaBootPro" to customize the bootloader - to name the entries appropriately, etc)...

If you have XP and W7 on separate drives, then you can generally use your BIOS's boot manager and simply select the correct HD to boot from (and you'll have one bootloader per OS - one on each drive).