Imaging Hard drive for Dual Boot

Good afternoon all,

I have 2 laptops. Laptop "A" has a 80GB HDD that I want to replace. It is currently running windows 7 32 bit. Laptop "B" I would like to put in with it (Dual Boot) it had 220GB HDD Windows XP SP3.

I will be installing a new 320GB HDD Seagate 5600 RPM on Laptop "A".

I know I can just restore the old windows 7 image on the new drive, but if I restore the other computers image and partition it to another name. Would that work for dual boot, or is there more to it then that?

Thanks in Advance

It wouldn't work "out of the box" for dual boot because the Win7 bootloader has no idea that another bootable partition exists. There will likely be likely driver issues involved for the XP partition. I'm not saying never, but after getting your partitions cloned the to your liking, I recommend:

• Use EasyBCD to modify the bootlader. EasyBCD is a freebie.
• Start the XP partition in Safe Mode
• Have XP drivers handy...
• Go to the Device Manager
• Uninstall all drivers. And I mean all drivers! That includes chipset, video, network, CPU, Power management, everything.
• Restart the partition and let Windows reinstall the drivers it needs.

This is by no means foolproof. There's always the chance that the XP core will find something it just won't like. But I do have an 90 percent (or thereabout) success rate with this method.


Hope this helps!

JordanCClark said:

It wouldn't work "out of the box" for dual boot because the Win7 bootloader has no idea that another bootable partition exists. There will likely be likely driver issues involved for the XP partition. I'm not saying never, but after getting your partitions cloned the to your liking, I recommend:

• Use EasyBCD to modify the bootlader. EasyBCD is a freebie.
• Start the XP partition in Safe Mode
• Have XP drivers handy...
• Go to the Device Manager
• Uninstall all drivers. And I mean all drivers! That includes chipset, video, network, CPU, Power management, everything.
• Restart the partition and let Windows reinstall the drivers it needs.

This is by no means foolproof. There's always the chance that the XP core will find something it just won't like. But I do have an 90 percent (or thereabout) success rate with this method.


Hope this helps!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

If I uninstall the drivers on the XP partition. Does that uninstall it from everything or only when I'm running that partition? EX: Everything would still work fine through my Windows 7 original partition. I'm really debating between using VMware or dual booting. I have no experience with either.

The 2 computers are
Laptop "A" = Dell latitude D620

Laptop B = Dell latitude D810

After uninstalling the drivers, how would I initialize the start of finding the drivers? or will it do that automatically?

Timeismoney08 said:

If I uninstall the drivers on the XP partition. Does that uninstall it from everything or only when I'm running that partition?

Click to expand...

That would be just the XP installation.

Timeismoney08 said:

After uninstalling the drivers, how would I initialize the start of finding the drivers? or will it do that automatically?

Click to expand...

It will do it automatically.


If you decide to go with VMware, there is a conversion utility that would create a VM from the disk data. Don't quite remember what it was called... The one time I tried it, I had the same sort of driver problem anyway, and never could get the VM to work. Ah, well.

JordanCClark said:

That would be just the XP installation.


It will do it automatically.


If you decide to go with VMware, there is a conversion utility that would create a VM from the disk data. Don't quite remember what it was called... The one time I tried it, I had the same sort of driver problem anyway, and never could get the VM to work. Ah, well.

Click to expand...

OK, Thanks a ton
I will give it a try tomorrow.