How To Dual Boot Windows XP | Windows 7

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Dual Boot Windows XP | Windows 7

October 3rd, 2009 bamdet Leave a comment Go to comments

What we are going to do is re-size our primary system partition that contains our Windows XP installation and then create a new partition for our Windows 7 installation.

We are going to use a Free program to do this.

Easeus Partition Master is an excellent program and did exactly as I wanted it to without causing any errors on my computer. I re-sized my primary partition and created a new 50GB partition for my Windows 7 installation. These are the actual screen shots as I performed this on my own netbook.

Step 1

Download:

Easeus Partition Master Home Edition 4.0.1

Click Here

Install the program and run it and you will see a screen like this one. My drive has a small 2GB disk recovery partition and the rest of the volume is partitioned the system primary where Windows XP and all of my programs and data are located.

Primary Partition To Resize

The yellow box represents the space that is used (20GB) and the rest of the drive represented by gray is unused space. So for our dual boot system we want to resize our C:NFTS Primary Partition and then create a second partition for our windows 7 installation.

Step 2

Make sure you click on the Primary Drive C as above so it turns blue. You don’t want to change any other partition you may have before your primary partition. Once you have done that click on the Resize/Move button on the top menu bar.

Click The Resize/Move Button

Now what you want to do is take your mouse to right side handle of the box and drag it to the left to the size you want your primary partition to be.

Click On Left Handle and Drag To The Left

I wanted to make mine about 40GB so as to leave room to ad new programs and data. Since I have 20GB that is used (yellow portion) I left about another 20GB as unused (light gray)

You can make your primary partition any size you want. As long as you leave enough room to make about a 50GB partition for Windows 7

Yours should look something like this.

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The yellow is what was already used.
The Light gray is what you resized your primary volume to.
The dark gray will now be the unallocated space we will make our windows 7 partition from.

Click OK

Now you can see we have re-sized our primary partition to about 40GB and have an unallocated partition of about 107GB

dualboot_7

Step 3

Click on the Unallocated line to turn it blue and then we are going to make our partition for Windows 7. Click on the Create partition button on the top menu bar and it will open up a window as below. Enter the Partition Label and then use you mouse to drag the right handle on the box to the left to the size you want the Windows 7 partition to be. You can also leave it to be the entire remaining size if you want to.

dualboot_8

Now as you did before grab the left handle with your mouse and drag it to the left to the sie you want your Windows 7 partition to be. I chose about 50MB but you can make yours what you want it to be. I wouldn’t go below 25 MB.

New Windows 7 Partition

Up until now we haven’t actually made in physical changes to our hard drive. If you look at the right hand menu bar under Operations Pending you will see the operation that are ready to be done. You can make changes or cancel the whole operation.

To make the changes just click the apply button and the program will make the changes that you have specified.

Click Yes

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