Originally Posted by
BigLar
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to install DOS (no floppy)
Just put FreeDOS on a USB stick (you can probably also put old-school MSDOS on a USB stick, but why would you want to.)
So, I had the choice of using either the XP/Win7 dual-boot option, or a third-party boot loader.
If just using XP and Win7, I would recommend the former. As long as you install XP first, Windows 7
should just see the old installation there and set it up automatically.
So - anybody using it? Anybody else here use a multi-boot configuration? If so, how do you do it?
I've got my laptop on triple-boot, Windows 7 / Windows 8.1 / Linux, but it's UEFI not BIOS and has two drives (Win 8.1 on mSATA, the other two on 2.5") so my solution isn't generalized. To get into Linux, I have to hold down F12 to see the BIOS list, but I added the Windows 7 install to the the Windows boot manager originally from 8.1.
For XP and 7 on a single drive,
personally I'd just run 7 and run XP virtualized, but I don't have any non-USB hardware or performance-sensitive software that won't work with 7.
I have not needed more than one version of Windows in parallel between Windows XP and Windows 8.1 (I skipped 8 entirely), and when I did it regularly with one of NT4/2000 and one of 95/95OSR2.1/98/98SE (I skipped ME), they were happy to coexist as NT/2000 was on NTFS and 95/etc was on FAT.
If I had to physically boot XP for something non-USB, here's what I'd do:
1) Install XP to a small partition.
2) Back up the XP partition to an external drive using clonezilla.
3) Try to install 7 to free space on the drive, minus 1GB. I think there's a good chance this will just work, AND set up the dual-boot. Have you tried it?
Assuming that didn't, or it killed XP in the process...
3a) delete the XP partition, create a pair of dummy non-Windows partitions, 1 of 1GB, and one the size of the XP partition.
4) (re)install Windows 7 on the free space.
Your partition layout would then be:
dummy #1
dummy #2
Windows 7 100mb system reserved
Windows 7
(yes, that uses up all your primary partitions. If you want a separate data partition, you are probably SOL, but you can probably make dummy#1 the first extended partition and put after...)
5) restore the XP partition to the dummy #2 space using CloneZilla.
6) Confirm you can boot both XP (with the partition #2 set active) and 7 (with partition #3 or #4 set active; unless you run bitlocker, either should work but the installer is picky and sometimes only one or the other is set up OK)
7) Install a SystemRescueCD image (
http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage ) and copy of GRUB to the dummy #1 partition.
8) Create a grub.conf file to allow chainload on (hd0,1) and (hd0,2) [assuming the active partition for 7 was #3... hd0,3 if #4... adjust down by one if using first extended for the dummy#1] and to boot systemrescueCD . Set the default and delay as you prefer.
9) install grub on (hd0,0) [or hd0,4 if using the first extended]
Should be good to go.