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Help me come up with a Windows XP-->Windows 7 transition strategy.

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Eóin:
Trying to run an XP install under different hardware (i.e. a VM) than it was setup on is asking for trouble, if not impossible.

Honestly, I've dual booted windows for years and never had any trouble, thought I also never cared if the windows drive was a different letter from 'C'. It simply doesn't matter what the drive letter is apart from aesthetics.

Carol Haynes:
FWIW- if you install Windows 7 anywhere it assumes it is on drive C: (Vista does this too - unlike windows xp which allocates new drive letters.) Drive letters are actually allocated in the registry so Windows XP will see the new install with an odd drive letter but if you boot into Windows 7 it will be on drive C: and XP will be on an odd drive - just for the duration of that session.

Set up the dual boot on a separate partition and they will both boot to drive c:

The other alternative is to do the following:

Find a Vista disk that can upgrade your Windows XP but you don't need to activate it.

Once you have Vista upgrade to Windows 7.

These upgrades aren't ideal but there is no quick way to go from XP to 7 - basically if you don't use an upgrade path you will need to reistall all of your software.

NB: One gotcha ... Windows 7 will install its 'boot' stuff on the active partition so if Windows XP is your current system partition the boot stuff will be installed there so once you are ready to make the big change you will need to clear everything off this partition except the boot stuff and then resize it and resize the Windows 7 partition to reclaim the space.

Darwin:
Damn! Carol beat me to it! That was going to be my solution, though I was going to suggest part of skwire's solution as a first step: use Acronis True Image or something similar to create an image of your XP install before you upgrade.

I did an in-place upgrade of Vista 64-bit to Windows 7 64-bit and have never regretted it (ie, there have never been any problems as a result, and I did it just over a year ago). This was with at least 200 non-MS applications installed as well.

app103:
I would get one of these for my OS drive:





1. Remove current XP drive and set it aside
2. Add new drive for Win7
3. Install Win7
4. Swap out Win7 drive for the XP drive when you want to go back

Not as convenient as dual booting, but it would be a whole lot easier and less risk of messing up either your XP or Win7 installations.

skwire:
Trying to run an XP install under different hardware (i.e. a VM) than it was setup on is asking for trouble, if not impossible.-Eóin (October 27, 2010, 07:06 PM)
--- End quote ---

I've always just run re-run the XP install in repair mode and it's worked MANY times over the years.  This XP install I'm on right now is on its third, different motherboard with nary an issue.

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