Dual booting Windows 10 and older Windows?

I haven't seen anyone posting about dual booting Windows 10 and an older Windows version. If anyone has done that, I'd be interested in learning how it's worked for running FS2004.

 

Art

I've seen reports that users who do this with a single drive, multiple partitions, often (or always!) get a "dirty drive" bit set, "Windows did not shut down properly" message, and Windows 10 must run a scandisk at that point before it will start up. Microsoft expects us to run virtual machines nowadays, not dual boot. Using separate hard drives might get around that problem.

Thanks for your reply.

 

Do you mean installing FS2004 in a separate drive? If so, that sounds very easy.

 

Art

I meant Windows 10 on first drive, and your older Windows version on a second drive.

I have a system with 3 seperate HDD's. My first drive runs Win 10, second Win 7, and third Win XP. I only have FS 9 and all of my add ons installed on the XP drive. Works great. My system allows me to press the F11 key at bootup so I can choose which drive to boot into. If you go this route make sure you unplug the drive or drives that you are not installing Win 10 on. After Win 10 is up and running then reconnect your other drives. Been doing this since Win 10 was released and I don't have any problems.

I'll give that some thought, bam1220. Thanks.

Likewise, I run a single Seagate 1TB hybrid drive (a 8GB portion of SDD and a 1TB mechanical storage) partitioned in three 350GB (approximately) partitions. This is mainly for my customer support, but also for me to learn and advise with knowledge and use on these multiple O/S's. W7 in first partition, W8.1 in second partition, and now W10 in third partition. They install with the option to use MS Windows multiboot loader, much easier than the advised three drive setup above with plugging in and out of the extra drives. Firstly will eventually wear out the SATA connectors on both drive and the cable. And one can use three drives with the MS multiboot loader as well, and save the drives from being disconnected. Then I have a Ubuntu Linux 15.10 on a separate 1TB Hybrid drive. It adds some complexity in the bootup, in that GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) starts first giving me a choice of Linux or Windows (Yes I know I could add all three Windows O/S's to GRUB), then when selecting Windows, I have the MS multiboot loader giving me a choice of W7, W8.1 or W10. I have set both loaders to default boot Windows, then W10 and each with 5 seconds for timeout, so it will boot unattended to W10 within 10 seconds.

 

Then I have a third 4TB hybrid, where all of my simulators and add-ons are installed. The advantage of this is as follows. I originally installed DCS, Rise of Flight, FS9, FSX Acceleration, X-Plane 9 and 10, P3Dv3, FlightGear etc under Windows 7 on this 4TB drive. Now as I introduced the later O/S's I simply rename the original SIM folders (and the ones under the user account for the config files etc, just for precaution), and install the SIM of choice under the new O/S to this same common drive, to set the necessary key registration, markers and pointers in the registry for this new O/S. Once installed and running, I copy over the renamed SIM folder contents (as well as the user folder contents under the user account for the config files, document folders, indicated above, to the same location under the new O/S) to the freshly installed folder, preserving all of my start-ups, add-on's, settings of the originally installed SIM etc. And it is a little less tedious this way than doing a fresh install into every MS O/S and then tuning etc. So I have three MS O/S's running my SIM's from one common drive.

 

To date no issues whatsoever with the three O/S's, the only thing I found with FS9 in W8.1 and W10, is that in full screen, in the main launcher, the aircraft window is black, and currently no known fix I can find. But easily solved if one wants to see the loaded aircraft, simply hold and tap the following key combo ALT and Enter, to switch between windowed and full screen mode. Then you can make your aircraft, scenery, airport, weather selections etc, then ALT and Enter for full screen, and go and fly. Works in multiscreen setup as well (my case five screens now).

 

So hope this helps you in running your SIM's under a multiboot multi O/S environment. I am considering in the New Year, to can W7 and W8.1, as all of my SIM's are running beautifully under W10.

 

Cheers

Andrew