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Copy a bootable partition
agoaj
Top TierOne FearRegistered User regular
Top TierOne FearRegistered User regular
I've finally upgraded from XP to 7, but I'd like to keep my XP install. I've got 30 gigs of unpartitioned space that should make a nice home for the XP install that's currently stuck on an aging 30 gig hard drive.
Is there a particular way I should copy it over so that I can still boot into XP?
Is there a particular way I should copy it over so that I can still boot into XP?
agoaj on
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- get your XP install into the 30GB of spare space; that should be easy, any disk cloning software should be able do it
- modify the Windows 7 bootloader to give you the option to boot XP from the 30GB partition; not too difficult, you can do that from the command line with BCDEdit, or using a GUI tool like EasyBCD
- make sure that your Windows XP install isn't going to try to read/write from the Windows 7 partition; this I'm not sure how to do
For that last point... yeah, idunno. My concern would be that your XP install has in its bootloader something that says "load your files from the first disk volume, first partition." Only that'll be your Windows 7 partition after the changes above, so booting XP might fail horrendously, and might even trash your 7 install. It might be that all you need to do is edit boot.ini on the XP partition, changing references to partition(1) to partition(2). Even then, you may have drive-letter issues if XP sees your Windows 7 partition as C:.