Do you dual boot?

I know of a few users on here that dual (or tri) boot, but I was wondering if this is a common thing?

Currently, I've only got my Window 7 installation, although I do have XP via Virtual Box if I need to run some older applications (ancient games!).

I'd be interested to hear what you boot setup is .

from time to time. At the moment, only a single boot of Ultimate 64Bit, but I sometimes (Technet) slap on another to deal with problems of my family or on forums.

I've been doing it since 2005, when I installed XP Pro on the Dell Latitude C640 that I had. It only had a 40GB HDD, but Win 2K was happy on 12GB, I used the rest for XP.

On my last Dell, at one time, I had a quad boot setup, Win 2K, XP Media Center, Vista SP2 & 7 Home Basic, all on a 100GB (93GB usable) HDD. And I had room for everything.

On my desktop, I dual boot between Win 7 Pro & Linux Mint 9 (both 64 bit), and have at least a dozen, perhaps 15, VM's scattered across the data partitions on both OS's. I like dual booting, as you have the solid feel of the OS better than the VM route.

Whenever Windows releases their next beta OS (if that's what they do), I'll make room for it too. Hopefully, drivers won't be an issue, as they change across different OS's. My intention was to install XP Pro 64 bit on here, but drivers are held me back. Plus, that would be a lot of work to install an OS that I'll seldom use.

Cat

I don't dual-boot, I run 7 with XP in Virtual

I may start doing it again, probably with Linux. Now that I have two 500GB Samsung hard drives in addition to my SSD located in my mid-tower setup, plus the two 1TB drives in the Sans Digital MobilStor external eSATA JBOD case.

I need to get to know Linux a little better, been poking at it for 11 years now and still haven't found one I really like yet. Who knows, time will tell though.

That was how I learned, by setting it up as a dual boot. Linux is a good choice for a secondary OS. Ubuntu is the main one, followed by Mint, which happens to be partially based upon Ubuntu.

Mint 10 is the most current version, but 9 is LTS (Long Term Support, 3 years), while 10 is one of the 6 month releases. I prefer the LTS ones, you don't need to constantly upgrade.

Linux dual boots well with Windows, but if one has the extra drives, it would be better to install it alone, if it's on the same drive, then your bootloader would be GRUB, should you remove Linux, you'd have to do a repair install of Windows to fix the bootloader.

I haven't decided if I'm going to dual boot on my notebook that's arriving tomorrow, for now, I won't. If Windows 8 is released as a beta, I may.

I'm still half way tempted to try installing XP Pro 64 bit on here, it will no longer be my main computer. But I know it will be some work involved, however it can be done. If the OEM's can downgrade new computers, then drivers are available.

Plus, many of the critical parts in mine are outdated anyway (surplus parts from previous models), there's XP drivers for most everything. If I can only get it to boot, I'm sure that I can make it work. Whether I use it much makes no difference, it's a time killer to me.

Cat

Dual boot here. XP and 7... previously also had various versions of Mint in a multi bot set-up but never tried mixing Linux with Windows.

They mix OK, it's just the bootloader will need repairing if Linux is removed. That probably holds true to all OS's.

I've mixed both for over a year with no problems at all.

Cat

I dual boot between Vista and W7 64 my primary OS. I have Vista 32 on a Separate hard drive. Vista is my backup OS in-case something happens to W7. I update it weekly by getting all MS updates and other software updates that maybe available.
I also backup the image for Vista32 weekly. I also ran MS XP virtual for awhile on my W7 machine rarely used it so it is no longer an option for me.
Someday I might take the plunge and try a Linux flavor. I have 4 internal drives..

I dual booted for a while during Windows 7 Beta/RC era. Once Windows 7 was released, Windows 7 was my primary OS. I kept another copy of Windows installed on the drive in case of problems with my primary OS. Once I realized that EasyBCD 2.0 would boot ISO's, I setup a few ISO's to boot from. Seagate DiscWizard (Freeware version of Acronis) is one of the ISO's that I setup to boot from. After configuring the Bootmanager to boot ISO's with EasyBCD, I decided I no longer needed a second install (not to mention two installs is against Windows Eula, even if it is only used for repair).

Special thanks to EasyBCD for making it easier to conform with Windows Eula.