Win 7 and XP on two hard drives

A

alljam

Active member
I was planning to install the HDD from my old PC as a secondary drive, which has XP Pro SP3 on it. Was a single drive on the old PC so no RAID setup. Will this cause any problems with Windows 7 (Home Premium) on the master hard disk?

What I thought I could do to run some old (possibly non-W7 compatible) programs/games was to amend the bios boot order to boot into the XP HDD when those programs needed to be used, then change the boot order as necessary.

When booting into W7, the XP HDD would appear as an extra drive and vice versa. I'm not sure if there's any issues here for system restore & Microsoft automatic updates; I was initially assuming that those would only be updated for the HDD booted into and the secondary drive would be left untouched. Any thoughts?
 
Gorman

Gorman

Author Level
This will not work. The XP install will be setup with all the old motherboard drivers etc and will not boot. A fresh install of Windows both 7 and XP would be needed to get dual boot working.

The XP license if OEM would also be tied to the original machine.

A better solution would be 7 Ultimate or Pro with XP Mode.
 
A

alljam

Active member
Thanks for replying so quickly.

The XP OS disk is a Mesh recovery disk; I'll have to check later where the OS licence code is but I think it was on a Microsoft sticker which used to be on top of the case. If the OS is on a Mesh cd does this suggest to a tied-machine OEM OS?

Spending a bit more on W7 Pro is ok (and less time consuming) if the old software will run in xp mode (Quicken 2002, some EA Harry Potter games, FIFA 2005, Colin MacCrae 2004, Far Cry & Pandora Tomorrow from 2004).
 
Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
alljam said:
The XP OS disk is a Mesh recovery disk; I'll have to check later where the OS licence code is but I think it was on a Microsoft sticker which used to be on top of the case. If the OS is on a Mesh cd does this suggest to a tied-machine OEM OS?
Click to expand...

If the sticker with the cd key on it was stuck to the machine rather than the CD case then it suggests OEM.
 
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