How to Dual Boot Windows 8 and 7 clean installation without DVD easily

If you think Installing Windows 8 overwriting current installation wouldn’t be a good idea then Dual Booting it with Current Windows 7 is a perfect alternative. Even Windows 8 in Virtual Environment won’t give that good experience so, follow this guide to easily install dual boot Windows 8 without need of DVD.

Windows 8 Dual Boot Installation Requirements

You need Windows 8 ISO Image and Virtual CD / DVD Drive installed on Computer. This can be done with software like Virtual CD, Daemon Tools, Magic ISO or anything similar which supports mounting ISO CD Images.

Create Hard Disk Partition for Windows 8 Installation

First of all, make a separate Hard Disk Partition for Windows 8 installation.

Go to Disk Managenemt. Right Click on My Computer and click on Manage >> Disk Management.

Find any Hard Disk Partition with more than 25GB space free. Right click on it and Shrink. Enter the amount to shrink in MB = 20480 (20 GB is minimum requirement of Windows 8)

Shrink Existing HDD Partition

Click on newly created unallocated space of size 20GB and create new Simple Volume.

New Simple Volume Wizard will open. Keep the File system as NTFS and Give name as “Windows 8” which will make recognizing easier at later stage. Don’t forget to check on Quick Format.

Create New Partition for Windows 8

Now, Partition has been created and we are ready to install Windows 8 on it.

Install Windows 8

Mount Windows 8 ISO Image – In my case, I have use Magic ISO which supports Mounting ISO from Tray icon. As soon as Mounting is successful, Autorun will start but close it.

Mount Windows 8 ISO

Open the DVD and navigate to /Sources folder where you will find Setup.exe

Run Setup.Exe

Run the Setup and Select to make “Custom Installation” instead of Upgrading current installation. This installs a fresh copy of Windows 8.

When asked “Where to Install Windows 8” Select the Partition which you created in above steps and Press Next.

Select Windows 8 Installation Partition

Installation begins with copying of files and then Computer will automatically restart. On Reboot, Loader will give two options- Windows Setup and Windows 7. Select “Windows Setup” and Press Enter to continue with Setup.

Installer is straight forward with clean GUI and more similar to Windows 7. That’s it!

First boot will take time which will include configuring Devices and Drivers (Network, Sound, etc)

Enter Windows Live ID to enter and you are ready to experience the awesomeness of Windows 8. You can read more about Windows 8 Experience.

Windows 8 Home Screen

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 16 comments
Sahil Kotak - September 16, 2011

This is surely a very good tutorial and I am just gonna give it a try right now. Thanks a lot for sharing it.

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Me - September 17, 2011

Great tutorial. Only one I found that was straight forward

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Stan - September 18, 2011

Hello Rohit, I did the install as outlind in the article and it installed with out problem. Only thing is I never got selecting default OS screen. Now Windows8 is the default OS and it doesn’t even give me windows 7 as an option to choose? I’m sure there has to be way to solve this but I’m stumped 🙁 will appreciate follow up.

Stan

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    Rohit Langde - September 19, 2011

    Windows 8 takes up default Bootloader and offers a screen to choose between Windows 7 and Windows 8 Dev Preview.
    Aren’t you getting any Blue Screen with OS option before login screen?

    Reply
Mohammed Javed - September 27, 2011

Thank you Rohit, for your great tutorial, it works perfectly well with my pc and appreciates your valuable input in an easiest way to make us understand. However I have been encounter problem while booting with my own mistake.

In windows 7 Ultimate I am using EasyBoot software for dual booting and while making adjustment in the said software, it has taken both booting as windows 8 and there is no option to boot for windows 7, so every time it boots only windows 8.

Could you please help me to address this issue?

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Siddhant - September 29, 2011

But Rohit from where we can get windows 8 iso image ????/

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mayank - September 30, 2011

I tried to create a partition as told above it converted all my partitions into dynamic partitions and windows could not get installed on a dynamic partition
please help

one thing more please tell me how to remove windows 8 lateron.

Reply
    Rohit Langde - September 30, 2011

    Unless specified, Windows create a Basic Disk so, I wonder how did you end up making a Dynamic partition. You need to convert them into Basic using some software.
    To Uninstall Windows 8, Just format the Drive where installation files are. Then from msconfig, delete Boot record of Windows 8 to boot Windows 7 normally.

    Reply
      karthikeyan - October 13, 2011

      hi! rohit langde i am happy with this tutorial i installed windows 8 on my laptop its working fine …….. in future i need help for were to get msconfig then how to do delete the boot record of windows 8.. please give the tutorial for that it is very helpful for me… thanks in advance

      Reply
mayank - October 1, 2011

give me the software to convert the disk back into basic one

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yacopsae - November 1, 2011

Yeah, it converted my drive to dynamic too, and now I can’t for the life of me figure out how to convert it back into basic.

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fiqcat - March 16, 2012

mr rohit… what is the differences between “logical disk” and “dynamical disk”????

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timbo - June 5, 2012

at setup.exe im gettin “setup.exe is not a valid win32 application”

Reply

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