How to install Windows 7 alongside another operating system
After explaining how to install Windows 7 from a USB drive we have remained outstanding as installing alongside another operating system. We will focus on the case of wanting to try with a previous installation of Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Advantage, and as several have told us that you had problems with the instructions we gave to install it from a USB flash drive as XP did not recognize this type of disc from diskpart, we will have an additional method to create a boot disk.
Instructions for installing Windows 7 along with other system may be deceptively simple, but it better be not very complicated, and are based on a simple premise: to partition your hard drive. That if we only have a disc. If have several, a good option is make one copy of secondary, format it and use it to install there Windows 7.
To partition a disk there are several ways, and if I remember correctly Windows Vista has a built in disk manager. In my case, I used GParted, a Linux distribution that can boot from CD or from a USB disk to the process.
Its use is really simple, and we LiveCD page count as a CD boot from USB or even a hard drive. Download the ISO, burn it to CD and boot from it will be really easy, but it's all a matter of a little research.
Once booted Gparted this show us our hard disk with different partitions to have. Assuming we only have one, select resize / move and show us a window from which you can select to want to leave the partition size.
To install Windows 7 you must have 16 GB disk, so that will be the minimum free space that must stop. Once this is done we can get, although I take to create a new partition with NTFS format, so you no longer have to do it later from Windows.
We almost have it. We left Gparted, reboot the computer and we started with the boot disk of Windows 7 we had created previously, with what begin the installation. Once the language data entered must select what type of installation we do.
In this menu you must select Custom Installation, so we ask that drive you want to install Windows 7, where we indicate the new that we had previously created. From that moment the installation process is automatic, restarting a few times and letting the ready to start tinkering with it system.
In every boot we will present a menu with two options, where we can select if you want to boot Windows 7 or prefer to start with the system that we had previously installed.
For those who have had a problem creating the boot disk of Windows 7 on a USB, the alternative is to use an application called MBRWizard. Before use, we turn our USB drive to NTFS format, which can be done from the command line with:
* Convert X: / fs: ntfs
Once converted, we downloaded MBRWizard and execute for our list of Discs:
* Mbrwiz / list
in it we must seek the number of our album (we'll call Y) and execute the following line:
mbrwiz / disk = Y / active = 1
From the Windows 7 DVD which we will pre-assembled, go into the boot directory and activate the USB drive so you can boot:
* Cd boot
* * Bootsect / nt60 X:
Now we just have to copy all the files to the USB, as we explained the other day, and now we can install Windows 7 from USB.
xcopy d: \ * / s / e / f e. \