Dual booting Vista and 7
Has anyone had issues with dual booting Vista and 7? I just did it and haven't had issues yet but want to be prepared for anything that could happen.
January 28th, 2009 6:53pm

I have 2 Vista partitions and a Windows 7 and have not had anything untowrd happen. I'm impressed by the stability of the beta.
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January 28th, 2009 6:56pm

I agree. Whereas separateWindows partitions, particularly different versions of Windows, have not played well with each other in the past, I am definitely impressed with the stability of Windows 7 even in the presence of Vista. I have not experienced any problems, beyond having todecide which OS is my default boot OS.
January 29th, 2009 7:53pm

I've had no issues either.
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January 29th, 2009 7:56pm

There have certainly not been any issues for me so far. Of course there is the problem of Windows 7 not being able to see the Vista partition unless you allocate the Vista partition a drive letter, but this is no major hassle. Some users have not had this problem when installing Vista and Windows 7 on seperate hard drives rather than seperate partitions, but I have been told by some that even two seperate drives have the same problem. Perhaps it is an intermittant problem depending upon drives. John Barnett - Windows XP Associate Expert; Windows Desktop Experience. - Web: http://www.winuser.co.uk; Web: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org; Web: http://vistasupport.mvps.org
January 29th, 2009 11:05pm

No issues here also. One test machine, the system could boot into WinXP, WinVista, Win7, or Fedora. Just as long as certain procedures are adhered to, there should not be any issues.
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January 29th, 2009 11:25pm

I have a multi boot with (XP Pro, Vista SP1 IE7, Vista SP2 IE8, Windows 7) and did not have any issue. I only noticed the language change from French to English on the boot manager. I used the command bcdedit /set {bootmgr} locale fr-FR to restore the original language Aski. MVP Desktop Experience
January 30th, 2009 1:34pm

John_Barnett said: There have certainly not been any issues for me so far. Of course there is the problem of Windows 7 not being able to see the Vista partition unless you allocate the Vista partition a drive letter, but this is no major hassle. Some users have not had this problem when installing Vista and Windows 7 on seperate hard drives rather than seperate partitions, but I have been told by some that even two seperate drives have the same problem. Perhaps it is an intermittant problem depending upon drives. John Barnett - Windows XP Associate Expert; Windows Desktop Experience. - Web: http://www.winuser.co.uk; Web: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org; Web: http://vistasupport.mvps.orgyea that's the only thing I noticed and I'm running off of two hard drives but it's not a big deal
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February 4th, 2009 12:29am

I use dual boot (Vista Home Premium and Win7) since the beta came out and it's been problem free.Moreover, I've been copying documents from one OS to the other and that went well too.I'm amazed at how the beta manages to be more stable and faster than the "finished" Vista! 'been running it since day one in sleep-wake, switching from cable networking to wireless and the other way around and I haven't experienced one crash.
February 4th, 2009 3:53am

I'm using WinXP Pro and Win7 together.After installed Win7, run cmd.exe with adminstrator and use bcdedit. There're no problems~ Frederick Zhang
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February 4th, 2009 6:27am

I'm also running XP pro and 7, but I have to use a completely separate program for boot selection. Is there an easy way to do it so that I can choose which OS to boot into at startup?
February 4th, 2009 10:40am

I can vouch for the other replies as I've had no problems whatsoever, but then again I'm using to different hard drives for each os
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February 4th, 2009 3:26pm

No major issues here. A minor annoyance being that my Vista C drive was set to read only once I made it visible to Win7 and Vista wouldn't let me change it to read/write without some fiddling.It really is a bind to decide which OS to use as default, with disk space being the decider as I've only given Win7 a small partition and haven't too many apps installed on it yet.
February 4th, 2009 6:02pm

If you don't include the fact that I a running a full CHKDSK on the Win 7 partition a few times a day as a problem, then I would agree that there are no problems. I have seen other threads devoted to this question, so it is not strictly on my machine. I would like to know how many other users are experiencing this. Windows 7 beta dual booting with VISTA Home Premium 2 GB memory 160 HD Gateway Laptop HP Officejet 6310 All-in One inkjet printer Verizon FIOS Internet Connection
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February 4th, 2009 9:28pm

I have not been able to activate or run Windows Update on my 64 bit Windows 7 installation. I don't know if that has anything to do with the fact that it is on a different partition on the same RAID 0 array thathas the 32 bit Vista Enterprise installation that I run for my primary machine.
February 4th, 2009 11:00pm

I have Vista and 7 on different drives and they have worked well as dual boot until I reimaged Vista with Acronis. I lost Windows 7 and just got confused with BCEdit and VistaBoot. There must be an easy way to sort it, in the end I had to run the Windows 7 disc and go for repair I think. Now it says Windows 7 recovered or similar embarrassing on the boot menu.
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February 7th, 2009 10:22am

I would think the vista partition not being visible in explorer is meant to be, in order not to change anything on the other os. This seems to happen when you install from the bootdisk only.I installed via mounted image from within vista (but clean new install on a different partition) an so of course i am able to see the vista partition inside seven as it had to have a drive letter mapped.Can anyone confirm this theory?
February 7th, 2009 2:03pm

I am having an issue with multiple boot loader. I have Win XP on C: (which is its own Hard Drive) and Windows Vista Ultimate on another Hard Drive which is partitioned into 2. I installed Windows 7 Beta on the hard drive that has Vista using the 2nd partition and ran the installation until it rebooted and got to where it shows the OS that I can choose. It is listed - Windows XP Pro - Windows 7 - Windows Vista Ultimate.I choose Windows 7 and sends me to an error page stating that it cannot load Windows 7 and that I should reboot using the installation DVD. I did that and used the repair option and was unable to fix this. Shows a boot error and cannot find \windows\system32\winload.exeHas anyone had the same issue and what can be done to rectify this. I am able to boot into Win Xp and Vista, nothing has change with those 2 OS
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February 18th, 2009 7:02am

You can find winload.exe in the folder windows\system32\boot.Size is 490760 Bytes and its date december13.Aski. MVP Desktop Experience
February 18th, 2009 1:10pm

I have XP Pro, Vista Ultimate, Windows 7, and OpenSuse running on a 640 GB RAID 0 setup with no problems.Mark
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February 18th, 2009 2:04pm

I see the winload.exe but it does not load Windows 7 when I select it from the OS choice menu on boot up. Gives me the error message and that I should try repair it which I have done from the installation CD but with no success.
February 18th, 2009 6:48pm

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