[Help] Dual Booting

[kjc733]

As many of you will know, a while back my laptop melted, which meant that I splashed out on some new hardware. Said hardware was Windows 10, and for a short glorious time I was able to run a newer version of Maya on my super powerful desktop. But the Microsoft in their infinite wisdom ran an update which killed the FlexiLM license server software, which means I've had to revert back to an old version of Maya on an old XP Pentium 4.

Now, I had this idea that my poor dead laptop had a perfectly serviceable harddrive and has a Windows 7 key. So my thinking is:
1. Install laptop harddrive in the Desktop.
2. License the Windows 7 to the Desktop using the key from my laptop.
3. Dual boot my Desktop from either the Win10 hard drive or the Win7 laptop harddrive.

Now nothing in life is ever simple, so I doubt I could just plug it in and reinstall windows. I'm assuming the BIOS will be all wrong (as it came from a laptop) and that Win10 may have kittens over sharing.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of thing?

 

[CABAL]

Fortunately, the BIOS is located in the motherboard rather than the drives, so there's no problem there. Windows has its own bootloader that is quite capable of detecting other Windows installs and letting you select from those. If you install Win7 on a second drive then the Win7 bootloader will be installed to that drive and it should detect Win10 on the other drive and let you pick which to boot, so long as your Win7 drive is before the Win10 drive in the BIOS load order. If the Win10 drive is first then it will detect the Win10 bootloader. I have no idea if you need to manually add Win7 to the Win10 bootloader or if the bootloader will detect it on its own.

 

[Majestic]

I used to use a program (can't remember what's it's called now) it was freeware and easily allowed you to edit the bootloader's and select the order of them. So you could for example select win10 as your first option in case you want to start the pc and walk off and let it load itself. The program had other options too if I recalled. Which were useful.

 

[kjc733]

Ok here's another question. As Windows 7 is already installed as the laptop operating system on the small HDD, do I even need to reinstall it when I plug it in to the desktop?

 

[Hellkite]

 

[CABAL]

Ok here's another question. As Windows 7 is already installed as the laptop operating system on the small HDD, do I even need to reinstall it when I plug it in to the desktop?

I'm not entirely sure, actually. It will make you reactivate it due to hardware differences if you just plug in the drive with Win7 already on it, but I don't know what else might happen.