Vista and windows 7 dual boot

808Alaska · 06-11-2009, 04:13 AM

Howzit everyone. well im looking at dual booting my system with vista and windows 7, however i was wondering if anyone has done this before and how it went for them. and also if their are any specific things that need to be done to make the dual boot installation smooth. like i said, i have never done this before so any help/info would be really appreciated. thanks.

carnageX · 06-11-2009, 04:17 AM

Lifehacker - How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista - How To

First result in Google.

I have a dual boot running on my system (technically a tri-boot with XP/Vista/7 until I remove XP from here). Install Vista first, t hen install 7 and 7 will automatically become the default bootloader and add both OS's to the bootloader. That's basically it; just make sure you have enough room on each OS's partition you make.

808Alaska · 06-11-2009, 05:07 AM

cool ill try that out. also what about a mac OSx with windows vista or 7? would that work?

darsunt · 06-11-2009, 11:10 AM

I hope you have a large hard drive. Some people on this board think you need 80G for each MS op partition so it would be good to have at least a 400G drive to have plenty of room for your other stuff.

hikaricloud · 06-11-2009, 11:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 808Alaska

cool ill try that out. also what about a mac OSx with windows vista or 7? would that work?

Do you mean dual booting a Mac computer with Vista or 7? I would not recommend trying it with 7, people have had nothing but problems with it, and it can really mess up your computer beyond repair if it screws up the Macs version of the BIOS, since the OS has access to it.

You can do it with Vista, but depending on your Mac, I wouldn't recommend it unless you have decent parts in it, plenty of RAM and the like.

808Alaska · 06-11-2009, 02:01 PM

yeah i have a 320GB 5200 rpm right now so im just gonna try the duel boot with vista and 7. but if for some reason i decide to go ahead and do Tir-boots then im gonna upgrade to a 500GB 7200 rpm.

95BlackGA · 06-11-2009, 03:07 PM

There's no need to upgrade to a larger hard drive. I have used Windows XP with as little as 13GB (Can use less), and both Windows Vista and Windows 7 with as little as 20GB (Could probably go less, but install may not be so easy.)

hikaricloud · 06-11-2009, 03:40 PM

Windows 7 requires at least 16gb of free space just for the installation, you'll want more space. I made a 40gb partition for mine, you can get away with that.

Saxon · 06-11-2009, 04:48 PM

Please people try an post in the right area.

darsunt · 06-12-2009, 06:11 PM

I've also heard about the 40G partition mentioned elsewhere as good for vista. I am installing on a 250G system and was thinking about a 40G partition purely for the op system. Leaving only 200G for everything else I want to do, which does not make me happy.

In one of my other posts a couple of people have mentioned 80G partition as necessary for vista. I was thinking maybe they have a point because Vista is famous for devouring resources and being huge. I understand 7 is just as big.

So I figure it this way: to be safe, 80 X 2 is 160G partition devoted to 2 op systems, and I'd hate to use half a disk just for the op system, the op is just a utility to enable the programs you really want to run. On a 300G disk the ops would take half the space! So I'm thinking 400G

I'm thinking about revising my vista partition to 50G (sigh).

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