hi community, i heard about diffrent bootmanager working with windows 7 i would like to install a win xp 32bit on my machine, cause i need some sata driver stuff that only works with 32bit (and the tools are working with win xp). installed at the moment is a win 7 64bit and i don't plan to reinstall that, so i search a good and clean way to create a new partition where i gonna put win xp on it. i would like to have a simple bootmanager where i can put win 7 as default, edit the time till it starts, without destroying my win 7 installation. its a while ago since i used boot managers and with the 100mb system partition of win 7 i got even more confused. so does any of you know a good tutorial for my plan? tnx in advance
Personally I use PBM by sadevelopment.com (not free) but the easisest and cheapest (free) way would be to use Windows 7's boot manager. First you need to backup your current Windows 7 partition to another drive using something like Acronis, Ghost or similar. Maybe make another backup by just copying all the files on to another drive if you're the safe type. Boot with XP CD and format the drive. Create a partition of the size you want and leave the rest unformatted. After xp is finished installing and you finish up installing everything you need for xp, pop in the Win 7 dvd and boot of it. Install 7 to the unformatted partition of the drive. Windows 7 will automatically add the XP installation to its boot manager. You will be able to change the default windows installation to boot into and how long to wait when you're in windows 7. That's the general idea. You can probably handle the details in between. If you google dual boot xp windows 7 you should find a bunch of detailed guides. And there maybe a way to just resize the existing win 7 partition, create a new partition for xp, install xp to that new partition then add it to win 7's boot manager but I've never done it so I'm not familiar. Again, Google is your friend if you want to go that way.
For a partition manager check out the free Easeus Partition Master. The free version only works on 32 bit versions. EasyBCD is a free boot manager front end for the Vista and Windows 7 boot managers. Both apps are award winning and a snap to use. I first started using them this week to build my first dual boot drive.
EasyBCD can fix anything when it comes to Bootloaders. Just run EasyBCD to add an entry, or install xp and then run EasyBCD to fix the corrupted loader, it'll work either way. EDIT : make sure u have EAsyBCD 2.0, otherwise issues will occur. Only 2.0 is fully compatible with win7.