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Hello everyone,

I have to be totally honest I have never made a dual boot system. But I have been meaning to try XBMC out of curiosity.
The system I would be installing it on would be a H67 based Sandy bridge I3 2125 CPU with 8gb of 1333 ram and a HD7750 video card. Storage wise I have 2 1TB HDD's one with the windows 7 64bit install on it and the other drive is a storage drive with not much space left on it.

How would i go about installing XBMC on that machine in a dual boot configuration without wiping out my windows 7 install. To be honest I am pretty gun shy about messing with a perfectly good working PC just to play with my first Dual boot configuration.

Thanks for any input from everyone. A short Step By Step guide would be fantastic if someone would like to walk me through it.
Also does XBMC use linux drivers for the video & sound card and does the player for videos have a lot of Adjustments like ..say MPCHC with madVR and stuff like that.

I have The Smooth video Project that plays all my videos at 60 fps with MPCHC along with madVR on my gaming rig that has a 2600k @4700mhz along with a gtx 770 and watching a 1080p MKV I can get cpu usage over 70% with the SVP setting cranked then on top of that I can go over 60% GPU usage if I crank the Madvr settings up. Kinda funny I am using around 300-400 watts to watch a video but the quality is amazing..better then a bluray disc in a stand alone player by a longshot.

XBMC is a Windows app too. Just install it there, no need for dual boot.

Ditto. And for what it's worth...windows media center might be another option for you. I built an HTPC in December with the hopes of using XBMC as my media center and I found it way too complicated. Specially if you're going to be using it to watch and record live tv. After days of trying to set up XBMC i just defaulted back to WMC. Another option is Media Browser. Essentially it's a windows media center plugin with XBMC-like skins.

You could try installing the full XBMC to a USB thumb drive and dual boot that way...

Yeah, you will have to probably go into bios to get your board to boot from USB when you want to load it, but it will alleviate you having to re-partition your hard drive or resizing, etc.

I think xbmc is the best. I think they getting their PVR system worked out to with these newer releases. I wouldn't use anything else really. I love all the choices, I mean that's what its all aout is the choice to make it customizable to fit your needs. I say try xbmc first at least.

toki wrote:

I think xbmc is the best. I think they getting their PVR system worked out to with these newer releases. I wouldn't use anything else really. I love all the choices, I mean that's what its all aout is the choice to make it customizable to fit your needs. I say try xbmc first at least.

Yeah, XBMC is what I use. Other times is browse my ISO directly on a network share. XBMC is great for the visual, however.