Win 10 on HDD A, Win 7 on HDD B, Help.

Helldiver

Helldiver

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Hey guys, I need your help.

So here's the deal. All of my art tools including 3D Studio Max 8 and 9 which I have plugins and tools that are no longer available in more recent versions, only work for those old ones. Although Max 8 and 9 load in Windows 10, I run into all sorts of problems (Viewport issues, UVW roll out not zooming, the list is long). More recent versions of Max (2010, 2013) are also having their own slew of issues.

So I rebooted from my storage drive which has Windows 7 on it. Restored all my apps and was back to work after about a 6 hours of reinstalling shit.

Is it possible in Windows 10 to do some sort of Virtual desktop, or something, so that I can switch to the other OS without having to go into the BIOS and switch boot drives?

I don't mind having to restart to switch. Basically I'd like a simple way without having to go into BIOS every time to switch OS. Say I'm done working, and I'd like to switch to Win 10 to play games or what ever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Mist

Mist

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You can dual boot or use a VM.

There are literally a dozen ways to do either.

I'm pretty sure you can even install Windows 7 into a VHD that can be booted OR loaded in a VM, at your discretion at any time.
 
Hachima

Hachima

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You could also set up a dual boot option so it just requires a quick reboot. Which ever os is virtualized is going to have performance issues with what you are trying to do.
 
Porkchop

Porkchop

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The Windows 10 setup will take care of the boot menu for you. Go into Win 7, create a partition for 10 on your second drive, format for ntfs, restart and boot from the 10 disc/iso, select the new partition and install. When it's done you should have a boot menu with a 5 second delay that lets you switch between 7 and 10.
 
Alkorin

Chancellor Alkorin

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Hachima_sl said:
Which ever os is virtualized is going to have performance issues with what you are trying to do.
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If I had a nickel for every time I've heard this...

It depends on what you're doing and how often you're doing it. If you're doing 3D modeling all day long and it's your primary business, you'll either need a beast of a machine or a video card that you can do PCI-E passthrough with. Both will do the job with a reasonable virtualization platform (like VMware Workstation).

Yes, if you use VirtualBox on a low end workstation, your experience will suck. If you know what you're doing, you can make it work just fine.
 
Helldiver

Helldiver

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The virtual desktop worked fine, unfortunately the mouse issues on some menus remained. None of the programs were laggy or anything and it took just as long to do any of my bakes.

Ended up using the boot menu option in the end. Gave me the opportunity to clean up that HDD and dedicate it to work. Default boots to Win 10, or hit F11 to switch to Win 7.

Thanks so much for the help and various options available.

And yes, I'm derp when it comes to dual booting and virtual desktop type things. I was still stuck in the MS-DOS days when we had to go into Bios to manually switch which HDD to boot from.
 
Izo

Izo

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Lenas_sl said:
Yeah but obviously OP doesn't exactly know what he's doing.
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When did that ever stop anyone doing anything? Learning by doing
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