Prevent Win7 boot loader from taking over the WinXP boot loader

Posted by Chris on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Chris
Published on 2012-03-31T15:15:54Z Indexed on 2012/03/31 23:35 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-7

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windows-xp

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dual-boot

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bootloader

My setup:

1 physical hard drive (500gb divided equally into 2 partitions)

Windows XP Partition (Current OS)
Empty Partition where I will be installing Windows 7

My question is how do I prevent the Windows7 boot loader from taking over my WindowsXP boot loader when installing the new OS ?

The reason I am asking is because I already have a ghosted backup of my WinXP partition and if I ever need to restore my xp partition using that backup, would it not overwrite the Windows7 boot loader that was placed in the XP partition with the one from the backup, thus making windows 7 unable to boot.

Also what would happen if I decided to delete the Windows XP partition altogether somewhere down the road and along with it the Win7 boot loader that was placed there, wouldn't that cause the system not to boot at all..

To avoid these issues, I simply want to make sure that BOTH the Win7 and WinXP boot loaders are available on their respective partitions and they do not interfere with each other in any way.

Is this possible?

Thx, Chris

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