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General discussion

Dual boot XP hom and Win7 Hom 64 bit

by rfchmbrs Feb 9, 2010 3:24AM PST

I'm thinking of the easiest way for me to transition from XP Home to Win7 Home 64bit and have the following as my route:

Ran WIN7 program and hard is fine for 64 bit.

Install clean drive, name it B: so it will be the first drive for a while. Will I have problems with B: as it used to be used for 5.25 floppies. I do have a floppy A: drive installed.

Run XP and insert Win7 disk and to custom setup and point it to B: for install. Will I have a problem with licenses as the Win7 is an upgrade version?

Begin systematically install programs on Win7 and removing from XP. Probably have some problems with licenses (ADOBE!!!) so will have to remove those from XP, unreg, install and reg on Win7.

Somewhere down the road, I hope to boot from B: with other drives cleaned.

To be sure, I believe that I can view data files etc. in both boot methods but not programs. ??

Any gothas I need to be award of?

Thanks,
RON C

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Good and bad...

by John.Wilkinson Feb 9, 2010 3:29AM PST

1.) You can label the new drive/partition B: if you want without issue.

2.) You can only perform a clean installation by booting to the DVD, not by launching the installer from within Windows.

3.) An upgrade license is for upgrading (replacing your previous version entirely). You may not use it to install Windows 7 alongside that copy of XP. Thus, you proposal is prohibited.

4.) You are correct: you can access files across OSes/drives, but must install most programs under the OS you wish to run them from.

Hope this helps,
John

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