Re: boot manager for XP / Win7 (+ others)

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The date and time was Monday, October 05, 2009 11:14:37 AM, and on a whim, John Smith pounded out on the keyboard:

Hi, I was hoping someone could suggest a good boot manager for a dual boot system comprising XP and Win 7 (and possible Solaris / Linux in the future)

I previously installed Win 7 whilst in my XP session. This polluted my XP system as it wrote Win 7 boot files to my XP partition. I don't want any of that funny business. So this time I decided to placed each OS on a separate SATA drive.

Configuration is as follows:

Motherboard: Abit NF7-S 2.0
SATA1: XP Pro SP3
SATA2: Windows 7 (Build 7600)

At this stage I have just been physically unplugging/booting the respective HDD's.

I think my motherboard/bios is too old for that F12 boot trick I've read on the forums. I also might be interested in installing Solaris (or some flavour of Linux) in the future on another partition I'll create on SATA2.

I heard that the preference is a boot manager that sits in the first track of the hard drive. I also want something that executes FAST and is simple to configure.

I've heard about Acronis (which I read is somewhat slow) and GAG. Does anyone have any recommendations/config advice?

Any help most appreciated.

JS



Hi John,

I used to use Boot Magic to manage my 5 OS's until I wanted to install Win7. I then moved to GAG which works well. It also has a floppy option to run that way if you like. And it was easy to configure.

I had to set the Win7 partition Active for the install AND hide my XP partition in order to stop Win7 from putting its crap on the XP partition, since they both reside on the same hard drive. Notes I had read online prior to installing said all that was needed was to set the Win7 partition active, but after three failed attempts, I was able to do it by hiding XP.



Terry R.
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