Dual boot with Windows 7 and Windows 2000 with PAE

nick99nack

Here's what I'm trying to do. I have a computer that has Windows 7 Pro x64 on an SSD, and Windows 2000 on a second hard drive. Windows 2000 has the PAE flag set in its boot.ini.

I tried bcedit and EasyBCD, and while those did allow me to successfully switch between the two OSes, Windows 2000 started ignoring the PAE flag which limits it to 4GB of RAM and 2/4 CPU cores (I'm assuming it skips that boot.ini file completely). I thought about trying GRUB, but I can't figure out how to use it for two Windows installations. Has anyone here done anything like this?

EasyBCD has the PAE option greyed out if I try to edit the Windows 2000 option, and bcdedit gave me some error.

nick99nack

I think what I will do instead is just wipe Windows 7 and install linux with a Win 7 virtual machine for the few times that I need Windows 7. Or maybe even Windows 10 LTSC. I don't need a modern Windows version very often, so I think that will be fine.

win32

If you do get LTSC, please tell me if you can do unit conversions with the supplied calculator (which is the one from Windows 7). It always crashes on me when I try selecting the option.

nick99nack

@win32 said:
If you do get LTSC, please tell me if you can do unit conversions with the supplied calculator (which is the one from Windows 7). It always crashes on me when I try selecting the option.

Will do. Were you using 32-bit or 64-bit?

win32

I run the 64bit version.

BlueSun

@win32 said:
If you do get LTSC, please tell me if you can do unit conversions with the supplied calculator (which is the one from Windows 7). It always crashes on me when I try selecting the option.

I'm running LTSC and it works fine when selecting unit conversions

win32

I just tried myself and now it works for me too. I guess the August or September cumulative updates fixed it.