upgrade windows vista home premium to windows 7

Windows Vista Installation Super Guide, Part 4: Dual Boo |Windows ...

In the previous part of this Windows Vista Installation Super Guide, we looked at how you might clean install Windows Vista on a new or used PC, wiping out whatever information and data might be on the hard drive. In this fourth part of the series, we will examine a related activity, and one that will be of particular interest to anyone that’s either nervous that Vista won’t meet their expectations or are already aware that Vista isn’t yet compatible with a particular hardware device or software application they still occasionally need to know. This installation scenario, which I’m calling dual boot, is technically multi-boot, because you can actually install an arbitrary number of operating systems on your PC if you so choose. However, I feel that dual boot is the most popular of the multi-boot setups, and thus it’s the one we’re going to cover here. To be clear, the goal here is to create a PC that is configured such that you can choose between Windows XP (any version) and Windows Vista (any version) at boot time, using a text-based menu. When you make your choice, you will boot into the selected operating system. If you do not make a choice, the menu will boot into your default OS after a set period of time. Note that while we are specifically using XP and Vista, it is possible to dual-boot between Vista and other Windows versions. The rules are generally the same, assuming you’re using an NT-based version of Windows. That said, older Windows versions in the 9x line, like Windows Me and Windows 98, and even older NT-based OSes, like Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, are no longer supported by Microsoft. We won’t discuss them further here. Comedian Steve Martin once joked about how to make a million dollars in real estate: “First, start with a million dollars…” Dual-booting XP and Vista is just like that: First, start with a working installation of Windows XP. But jokes aside, this is indeed the first rule: If you intend to dual boot between Vista and any other Windows version, you will need to install the non-Vista OS first. The reason for this is technical: Every NT-based version of Windows ever created has included the ability to multi-boot between different OS versions, and the boot files created by these systems include facilities for a text-based menu that lets you choose an OS at boot time. As Windows has progressed over the years, so have these boot files. And the boot files in Windows Vista are both newer and different than the ones that came before. So while Vista knows all about the boot files and menus from previous Windows versions, those previous Windows versions know absolutely nothing about Vista. So the simplest thing to do is to install XP first, and then Vista. Hint: While I won’t explicitly cover this possibility here, you can in fact install Vista and then XP if you want. However, you will need to use Vista’s recovery tools, on the Vista installation DVD, to later repair the boot menu. We’ll look at these tools in a later part of this series, but the advice still stands: For best results, install XP first and then Vista. OK, we’ve established the installation order. But there’s another issue to consider. Each install of Windows on this system–XP and Vista–will need to be installed on a different partition (or a different hard drive, each of which can logically be formatted as single partitions). This means that you will either need: If the system you’re going to configure for dual-boot already has a copy of XP installed on it, chances are that you only have a single partition. In this case, you will need to defragment the disk and then use a third party disk utility to create a new empty partition at the end of the disk to which you can install Vista. I use PartitionMagic for this purpose and it works well. However, PartitionMagic is a retail application that costs money, and it’s hard to find in typical electronics stores. So you’ll need to order it online, or find a free alternative. I have absolutely no experience with free disk partitioners, but please send me a note if you’ve used one and I’ll add that information here. If you do end up partitioning your hard drive to make room for Vista, note that you will want to backup all of your important data first as a precaution. (You will also need enough free space on the drive to make a new partition; I recommend at least 10 GB.) Good partitioning tools like PartitionMagic work non-destructively, but this is your data we’re talking about here, so do the right thing and backup first, just in case. If you haven’t yet installed XP, do so now. I won’t explain the entire process here, but you can refer to my Windows XP Clean Install (Interactive Setup) /showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp article from 2001 for details. If you are doing this from scratch, I do have one bit of advice: In Step 5 of the aforementioned article, you’ll see a part of XP Setup where you choose the installation partition. Instead of selecting the entire hard drive, use this part of Setup to delete whatever partitions are present and then create two partitions, one for XP and one for your eventual Vista install. Install XP to the first of the two partitions. Then, move on to Step 6 per the article. 3. If XP is installed on the only partition on the only hard drive in your PC, run the XP disk defragger and then use a tool such as PartitionMagic to non-destructively resize that partition and make space for a new Vista partition at the end of the disk. If you already have a second partition, or a second hard drive, you can install Vista to that location. While it’s not strictly necessary, I find it simpler if the current version of Windows–that is, the version to which you have booted on a dual boot system–is always listed as the C: drive. Thus, when you boot into XP, your drive layout should look like the list above. However, when you boot into Vista, it should look like this: If you see a message about hitting a key to boot the DVD, do so. Otherwise, the PC will simply launch into Setup and display a black text-based screen with the message “Windows is loading files…” After that, you’ll see the Vista boot screen and the screen will move into the initial phase of Setup.

...

Pages

Categories