i just ordered vista and am planning to dual boot it with my current install of xp. im going to install vista on a SECOND hdd. just wanted to know if there is a way to dual boot without having to swap in/out drives or going into bios each time i wanna switch to the other. is there a bootloader to use with this? or can you do it with vista's or xp's bootloaders? i've been looking around in various forums and its been hard to find an answer to this since pretty much all threads are for 1 hdd 2 partitions, and because people hijack threads with different questions (so i decided to start my own thread). i'd like to keep this thread dedicated to 2 hdd because of the above. so if anyone has OTHER questions dealing with this topic PLEASE post it in your own or another thread!
Howdy there, I havnt tried dual booting vista here as I do not have it installed, but I very much doubt you will have to swap drives or mess with the bios at all. I would imagine the the vista will pick up on the WIN XP partition on your C: drive upon installation and write to the MBR, which, in turn will then ask you which drive/OS you wish to boot from upon starting your computer. I would also advise that you back up any important data before proceeding !
I saw a topic on another forum, that is similar to what you want to do. The directions are pretty simple, I think it's what your looking for. The following are the directions from Timos: "Vista/XP dual-boot w/ TI - successful test! For those interested in dual-boot (multiboot) of Windows Vista and Windows XP, I performed the following test with TI and it worked like a champ: Configuration: Intel D975xbx2 motherboard Intel Core 2 duo processor 3 internal Caviar SE16 320 GB SATA hard drives Kingston RAM (2GB) 1. Installed Windows XP on 1st drive (single partition) 2. Installed Windows Vista on 2nd drive (single partition) 3. Vista automatically setup dual boot so that I could boot to either drive/OS" The rest of the steps only deal with recovery from harddrive failure and are in the link below. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=177992 I think the major thing to remember is to install Windows XP first, then Vista.
i had suspected as much. my guess is that since Xp was released first installing it will wipe your mbr of vista, because it doesnt know what it is, and leave you with just Xp. well its time to "ghost" everything to my external backup drives. thanks for the help guys i'll let you know how things fair when my shipment arives (probably midweek)
found a boot tool that can help with this its called Bootit N.G. (next generation) aka BING. will work with win 9x-vista, 32 and 64 bit cpus and OS's, and also has some partition/drive management tools. its only 760 kb (thumbs up for all you 56kers lol) http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
installed vista (in the manner mentioned above) and everything seems to be going fine so far. i have not tryed going back into xp yet though, having too much fun in vista
