The PC users at work are pretty much standardized on Windows XP, but a couple of people use applications that are slated to be upgraded soon, and one of the requirements with that upcoming new version is Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. I had zero seat time on Win7, so to prepare for that upgrade I installed it on my computer a few months back. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to XP just yet, so I thought I’d be smart & set it up to dual-boot between XP and 7. That process went pretty smoothly — so much so that I don’t even recall how exactly I did it. After a few initial glitches,
Last week I ordered a couple of new Dell machines to replace some older hardware elsewhere in the building, and both of them arrived with Win7 already installed. Both had more horsepower than my (then) current desktop machine, so I decided exercise my prerogative as Preventer of Information Services to shuffle my year-old desktop down to one of the other users and drop one of the new machines on my own desk. Migrating my stuff over to the new machine — Windows 7 to Windows 7 — was pretty slick (another nice Win7 feature, but what about moving apps?), but when I set about ridding the machine of the dual-boot situation, I ran into a snag…
When I set up the XP/7 dual boot, I installed 7 on a second hard drive, thinking that when I decided to either go back to XP or stay with 7 I could just pull the other drive and sail along on my happy way. After all, it’s worked that way with the Mac OS since about forever… (must’ve been lulled into thinking the guys at Redmond had made some legitimate advancements to the Windows platform.) I shut down, pulled out the XP disk, and the computer refused to boot. Fantabulous.
So to Google I goed, and found lots of help to get me where I needed to be, but it was far from easy… The short of it is, I had to boot up in XP, copy the boot record files from the XP drive/partition over to the Win7 drive/partition, boot up with the Win7 installer disk, go into the Repair mode, jump into the command line and enter some magical incantations, and finally it would boot up from the Win7 drive. Of course it took me quite a while to actually get there… The video below was the best set of instructions I found to get the job done, but because that tutorial deals with a dual-boot setup on one disk and deleting the XP partition, I had to make several adjustments along the way. Plus, setting this computer up was one of those peripheral tasks I was doing while doing a couple of other things, so it was more of a minor annoyance; I was about this close to just nuking the disk and reinstalling from scratch when the planets aligned and everything came together. All’s well that ends well, I guess.
Windows 7 is definitely an improvement over XP, but it’s still no Mac OS X.