Dual booting WIn7 and XP on two different HDDs

Quote:
Having the Windows dual-boot menu would be so much less of a hassle. I doubt this motherboard has a quick boot menu. Mine does, so I don't need a dual-boot menu (even though it would still be much less of a hassle).

Quote:
I recently installed Windows 7 on my friend's system that had a separate hard drive in it with XP on it. I left the hard drive totally plugged in, but Windows 7 didn't make a dual-boot menu. Regardless of which drive we select, whether it's the XP drive or Win7 drive, there's no boot menu. So he has to press Del to get in the BIOS, then navigate to the Advanced BIOS Features, then he has to go into the boot order area, then he has to use Page Up or Page Down to change the boot order of the drives, then he has to press F10, then hit Enter and then wait. What a hassle.

Quote:
That is exactly what he is trying to do, and his question is: will Windows 7 set up a dual-boot menu?

Yeah, but we need somebody who has actually done this. I have. But unfortunately, Windows 7 did not set up a dual-boot menu on that computer. I expected it to, but yet it didn't.

But yet when I installed the official Release Candidate of Windows 7 on my system (as opposed to my friend's system that I'm talking about above), it set up a dual-boot menu on my XP hard drive. Unfortunately, the dual-boot menu doesn't allow me to use it to boot in to the official RC of 7, so I just use it to select "Previous version of Windows", which is XP. However, I'm not surprised that it's broken like that since dual-booting was said to be unsupported in the official RC of 7.

Thanks to that experience, I installed the retail version of 7 on my system with the XP hard drive unplugged, so I don't know if this can depend on the system or not.

Quote:
It's possible that you may be able to use the Windows installer to make a new partition with the unused space on the XP drive so that you can install Windows 7 on there in order to be assured that it will create a boot menu. Of course, you'd boot from the installation DVD, and then choose the "Custom (advanced)" installation, and then choose "Drive Options (advanced)" to get to the place where this is done.

I mean, you'd do this if there's no way a dual-boot menu would be created by installing Windows 7 on a separate hard drive with the XP hard drive still plugged in during the installation.

Quote:
You can always manually add it, but indeed, weird.
It's Ultimate I installed by the way.

Quote:
Yeah, I had a feeling it was either Pro or Ultimate.

Quote:
What motherboard doesn't have a boot selection menu?

Install the drives seperately with independent MBR is the easiest and best way. When you want to boot into another OS, you just actively use your boot menu as opposed to wait/select the Windows boot loader each time. Being seperate OSes, you don't have to worry about having issues when you decide to reformat.

Also, what version of W7 do you have? Pro and above have a XP Mode which includes a virtualized XP license.

Quote:
The abit IP35 Pro does not have a quick boot menu. The user is forced to go into the BIOS and go through that little hassle just to change the boot order just so that they can boot to the other drive. But with my 680i, all I have to do is press Esc, arrow down, press Enter, arrow up/down, press Enter and wait for it to boot.

Quote:
When I installed the official Release Candidate of Windows 7 for the first time, I left my XP hard drive plugged in not expecting it to create a dual-boot menu since all my research said it was not supported in the Release Candidate. But it created a dual-boot menu anyway, except that it failed to boot Windows 7 and had no problem booting XP, or the "Previous version of Windows".

The error says that a recent hardware or software change is the problem and that I should use the installation disc to choose Repair My Computer.

Then it explains that winload.exe is missing or corrupt, so I'm assuming that from day 1, it was looking for this information on the XP hard drive. And if that's true, then that explains why people are saying that it's not possible to get a dual boot menu using 2 separate hard drives like that.

Quote:
It worked fine for me. I have Windows 7 Home Premium on one hard drive, and XP on another, and it gives me the Boot Manager every time. It was a pleasant surprise, because I didn't even know it could do that.