I recently tried to prep for a demo. I was given a VPC that I tried loading up on my 32-bit Vista laptop. Not so fast. The VPC guest is a 64-bit Windows Server and wouldn’t load up on a 32-bit host. Ok, so I’ll switch over to my 64-bit Vista home PC. Not so fast again. Virtual PC doesn’t run on a 64-bit host. In this case, VMware Converter and VMware Server saved the day, but I still needed a better solution.
I figured it was time to upgrade my work laptop to Windows 7, especially now the Release Candidate is available. But I also need to be able to run virtual machines, so clearly Windows Server 2008 R2 is a better choice as I’ll be able to use Hyper-V. (Of course, I have a bunch of VPCs that aren’t compatible but that’s a battle for another day.) Since I want to use Windows 7 as my daily driver, I figure why not dual-boot.
My research turned up a post by Keith Combs from MS that pretty much did exactly what I wanted to do, but I started with Windows 7, whereas he started with Windows Server 2008.
My ThinkPad T61P laptop had the following configuration:
Hard drive 1
- System Partition (Windows 7) c:
- Data Partition e:
Hard Drive 2
- System Partition (Windows 2008) d:
I first installed Windows 7 to c:. Using the handy example in Keith’s post, I used http://catalog.update.microsoft.com to download drivers for the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M in my laptop. I’m still without some drivers but I’m not sure what device they’re for yet. Lenovo has setup a Windows 7 Beta driver page at www.lenovo.com/windows7beta, but there’s not much there yet.
I then installed Windows 2008, mounting the ISO from within Windows 7. I selected the appropriate partition (note, I had other data on the partition that wasn’t disturbed by the process) and let Windows install. It added Windows 2008 to the boot menu and I was able to finish the setup largely as Keith did.
At this point, everything works as expected, I can dual boot to each respective OS, and files are available from either one. To further configure the setup to work the way I want it to, I opened up a command prompt as an Administrator and used bcdedit to change the default OS to Windows 7. That way I won’t have to worry about booting up Windows 2008 unless I really want to.
One great tip was found in Keith’s blog comments. Robert Larson has a post on his blog explaining how to use the Windows 7 drivers installed to c: in my case to update missing drivers installed inside of Windows 2008.
I’m hoping this setup will give me much of the flexibility (as well as power) to run my demos. One other approach I’m looking at is directly booting into a VPC. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that needing to run sysprep on the guest virtual machines will run havoc with all the other software that’s currently configured in them, but I’ll post when I confirm if it works or doesn’t.
I’ll have to say that it’s been a long time since I’ve done dual boot, vastly preferring using virtual machines for the last several years. It was an extremely pleasant experience loading up two different OSs, getting them to dual boot without any third-party software and on a notebook, and in relatively quick order. I’d estimate this entire process took about 1.5 hours, if I exclude all the other software I loaded up in Windows 7.