What are the risks of dual booting Windows 10 on my VAIO (W8.1)?

[FAHMI BASSEM]

Windows 8.1 has always been buggy, unstable for me, so I just decided to use Windows 10, because it's preview, it's better to dual boot it.

I want to know the risks, since I've tons of files on it + is my only laptop.

 

[TheSteve87]

The only risk that comes to my mind would be a corrupted bootloader.

If you want to go safe, you can install Win10 on a virtual hard disk (since the technical preview is a pro version, you can do it).
This way nothing will be modified in your Win8.1 installation, the Win10 "partition" would be invisible to Win8.1 but all the data in the Win8.1 installation would be accessible from Win10. You can even create the .vhd file in the Win8.1 disk without repartitioning, you only need enough free space.

 

[David Feifer]

About the only risk I can think of in a dual boot environment is accidentally installing 10 on the wrong partition. The only consideration at this point is whether you have enough space on the drive for the installation. The current size of just the windows directory alone on my system is 22 gigs so I would at the least make a 40 gig partition. Personally I would install windows 10 in a vhd so you do not have to play with physical disk sizing. Dual boot using vhd= Native VHD Boot to Windows 10 Technical Preview Dual Boot with Windows 7 or Windows 8 | Next of Windows

 

[Guzzler3]

Just make darn sure you have a WORKING recovery disk. Even with a dual boot scenario, it is prudent to have one, for the "Oh crap!!! I pressed the wrong button" moment.

Hell, just have having a working recovery disk is just plain required, IMHO.

 

[FAHMI BASSEM]

i'm confused!
which one is better, dual booting or virtual machine ?

 

[Guzzler3]

Either. What is the one that you feel most comfortable with? With a VM you really don't have to worry about drivers, as the virtual machine uses "generic" hardware for the virtualization. You might not get all the full functionality of specific hardware, but it let's you play around with the new operating system to see what it is like.

Dual booting, you need to make sure that there are drivers for the new OS. If W10 has all the drivers included for your device, it is nice to see how all the fun and interesting things that are specific to that device works. Sometimes you can 'cheat' and use the W8.x drivers if you are missing a driver or two. The problem is that you might run into a bug that driver specific, and you'll have to wait for an updated driver to see if that fixes it.

But to help with the process of polishing off the OS it is better to do dual boot, imho. As any errors will be auto reported back to Microsoft, and if there is a hardware/driver issue, then Microsoft will notify the manufacturer.

 

[FAHMI BASSEM]

I decided to dual boot.
But now I've another problem, my VAIO refuses to boot from USB!

I successfully got into BIOS, set External drive as booting option, but when I save, restart, then boot Windows 8?

Any suggestions?

 

[Guzzler3]

Did you prep your USB drive properly? You can't just copy over all the files from the ISO and expect it boot.

Here is a text file with the instructions on how to make a bootable USB thumb drive (for some reason the forum filters won't allow me to copy and past the instructions in a post anymore):

 

[FAHMI BASSEM]

Did you prep your USB drive properly? You can't just copy over all the files from the ISO and expect it boot.

Here is a text file with the instructions on how to make a bootable USB thumb drive (for some reason the forum filters won't allow me to copy and past the instructions in a post anymore):

I successfully dual booted windows 10, the problem was that It must be bootable as GPT not MBR.