how do i boot from wondows xp home ed w/sp3 32 bit ,to windows 7 rc 64 bitwith both hard drives in my pc ?

First Verify the size of your Primary Drive in GB. To beter validate this do this: open Calc.exe Multiply Drive size in GB by 1024 Write this number down.Reboot.Enter the BIOS Visually Confirmed that the drive with XP SP3 has a certain name (it will also have a bootable flag,and be listed in "Hard Drive boot priority" 1st.)Be certain. Write down the drivename assigned by BIOS(some thing like WDC 16000456A or thereabouts.) It will be 1stin boot orderand contain the amount of MB that your drive has.THIS IS THE DRIVE NOT TO FORMAT. Insert Windows 64 bit Seven DVD you made F10 and be certain to Exit without saving any changes. Press a key when prompted to "Press Any Key to Boot From CD or Floppy"At the start it will prompt you with options to "format" a drive.Again, you have a record by now of which one NOT to format (beleive me, I've done this. Don't be a hero). Select your alternate drive and format/proceed with install. (this gives you the Clean Install the Instructions mention)A boot loader will automatically install.It will offer you An older Version of Windows or Windows 7 at Reboot.Surprisingly enough Windows 7 has about 1/3rd the install time of previous versions.

Thank-you GR3ATLION, but tell me I have windows xp on 1 drive and windows 7 on the other drive, both boot up fine , butI dont get a screen that gives me the choice of which 1 I want to boot to,I have to go into bios an change them in order to boot to the 1 I want. why is this ?

I have the same set up as clf127737 I have Windows XP Pro 32bit installed on Primary Master C: I disconnected all drives and did a clean install of Windows 7 on Primary Slave H: Connected all drives and booted to Windows 7 fine. Rebooted and went into BIOS to change boot drive order and booted to Windows XP. Now I would like to make it so I have the option of using either one at boot up. Boot.ini under WinXP?? What under Win7??

Thank-you GR3ATLION, but tell me I have windows xp on 1 drive and windows 7 on the other drive, both boot up fine , butI dont get a screen that gives me the choice of which 1 I want to boot to,I have to go into bios an change them in order to boot to the 1 I want. why is this ? That is a good question. I do get a boot menu. I don't know.

Openskys,Since XP is on your primary master, which BIOS will boot to 1st, you should edit boot.ini there.CLF,Which system is on which hard drive? BIOS will boot to the one you tell it to boot to 1st. This will usually be the primary master hard drive. You will need to modify the boot loader of your 1st boot drive system. My system is very similar to yours with Vista Home on one drive (the original that came with the computer)and W7RC on another drive in its own partition. When I installed W7RC onto the computer, the option came up after first reboot, so I can't tell why yours doesn't. Regards from the Valley of the Sun.

Openskys, Since XP is on your primary master, which BIOS will boot to 1st, you should edit boot.ini there. When I installed W7RC onto the computer, the option came up after first reboot, so I can't tell why yours doesn't. As to why I do not get the option, I removed all drives and installed Win7 on my Primary Slave. After install I reconnected all drives and booted into Win7. After a restart and going into the BIOS to change the boot back to the Primary Master, I am able to boot to WinXP. I have tried to edit the boot.ini, but it does not boot to the Primary Slave. I get a message saying it can't find the files needed or something. This is in my boot.ini now under operating systems: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect I have been thinking that I will just wipe out both drives and install WinXP on Primary Master 1st, and then install Win7 on Primary Slave threw WinXP. This way I am very sure I will get the option needed to choose between OS's. I just didn't want to go this way at first with all my drives and data hooked up. Hate to lose all that stuff. I will hold on a couple days to see if anyone comes up with a different way to edit the boot.ini to maybe aim to a specific area of the Win7 drive perhaps.

clf127737 and Openskys,Go and find a program called EasyBCD. Read carefully anything you find about using it with Windows 7. There is a beta version out that does all the file copying for you, and sets it all up. But you have to read the instructions for it carefully. This is what I used when I could not see my Windows XP install after installing Windows 7 without the Windows XP drive in the machine. This is based on the built in features of BCDedit that are included in Windows 7 (and Windows Vista). BCDedit is a command line utility, and EasyBCD is a gui.

Awesome! After struggling with running <DVD>:Setup.exe directly from XP (MCE), repartitioning various drives and troubleshooting the frustrating "winloader.exe missing or corrupt" ... we were almost ready to do something more drastic when we found your post. Your recommendation worked perfectly! We now have W7 offered as dual boot w/ XP and are happily proceeding with our W7 setup.We have two IDE HDs each with two partitions and a SATA with one large partition -- we put W7 on one of the IDE drives.For reference: our 2.8 Ghz machine often "seemed" hung during the install -- but patience won out. It took 3 minutes for the first setup screen to appear during the direct DVD boot, and another 20 minutes before W7 was up and running. Our machine stopped showing a video display at one point during the install -- but once again, patiently waiting for setup to complete worked out. Ourmachineis connected to an HD TV screen as it's primary display device and the generic video driver didn't produce a signal the HDTV would accept --fortuantely connecting a second monitor to the dual video output helped us troubleshoot this issue.Thanks again for taking time to post.