Member Avatar for Danniboy

Hi Guys!

i have just bought (amongst a new graphics card and tv tuner card) an OEM copy of windows vista home premium x64bit edition.

my question for whoever may be able to answer is..

what is the best method for creating a dual boot of vista and windows xp?

i have found a few guides that involve partitioning, but i dont particuarly want to do it this way. i have 4 harddrives instaled, including a 320gb and 500gb
i was hoping to have the dual boot set up having installed xp and vista on two *SEPARATE* harddrives.

would this be possible at all?

i hope if explained it clearly enough lol

thanks very much in advance for anyone's help! :)

Danniboy.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by hughv
Member Avatar for scru

yes it's possible. I did it. Install them on separate hard drives and boot from the one you want.

Something odd and expectedm yet helpful that I encountered:
I installed Vista second on its own hard drive, and it wrote the Master Boot Record to my XP hard drive instead, so my Vista Hard Drive wont boot on it's own. However, it's helpful, because I dont have to manually select which hard drive to boot from anymore; since the entries for both OS are on the same drive I just set the BIOS to boot from that one.

Member Avatar for Danniboy

kool, sounds like a good solution, altho personally i think id prefer to have a manual selection during the boot up.

..this will sound kinda newbish.. but wheres the masterboot record changed? and how do u do it? lol, its been a looooong time since ive done anything in particular to any pc :P

Member Avatar for scru

i do have a manual selection. the new mbr on my xp drive lets me choose between xp and vista.

You cant change the mbr on your own, you need a third party software to do that

if you want to avoid that altogether, you can remove all the other hard drives except the one you are installing to until you are done. Also, i have a suspicion that the behavior i encountered might be due to a possibly incorrect hardware configuration. It's still cool.

Member Avatar for hughv

I have the same setup-4 HDs, XP on one, Vista on the other, One RAID, one data and a USB backup drive.
The Vista install should be after the XP install, and will automatically create a boot menu.
The Vista boot manager is done with BCEdit, which is complicated and abstruse. Try Vista Boot Pro, which makes the process intelligible to the average user:
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

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