Hi, Mike.
> I very quickly wrote a
> swapper
> that made my 100Meg HD into a 5Meg HD that had no room left so he wouldn't
> install any games....
Cute idea! ;<)
Well, back when 5 MB was a big drive and I could understand FAT and the MBR,
I could probably do stuff like that, too. My favorite trick was to copy the
first 10 tracks or so of my HD into the last 10 tracks, then mark those
Used. Then, after our all-too-frequent thunderstorms, I could copy those
tracks back to the front to replace the critical startup bits that had been
zapped by lightning.
I do use the BIOS swap for booting, in addition to the Microsoft boot menu.
I have 3 HDs (4 actually, but 2 are a RAID mirror), each formatted with a
single Active primary partition and the rest of the drive in an extended
partition divided into multiple logical drives. I've installed Vista 3
times, once with each HD as the boot device, so that the MBR and other
startup files, including the dual-boot menu, are on each of the 3 HDs. So
if the 120 GB HD fails, I can boot from the 200 GB and keep working. I have
at least one WinXP or Vista boot volume on each HD, just in case.
Well, I USED to do all that. Vista has been so dependable that I haven't
booted into WinXP in months and I'm not sure it would boot anymore. These
new HDs are also much more reliable than the ones I was running a couple of
years ago. (2006 was a bad year for hard drives in my computer.)
In the early part of the Vista beta, we were able to just edit WinXP's
Boot.ini to choose between Vista and WinXP. But then Vista began to use its
new BCD (Boot Configuration Data) system. You should find that in the
hidden \Boot folder on the System Partition of your new Vista computer.
That's the main difference between booting WinXP and booting Vista, and it
takes some getting used to.
Dual-boot menu versus BIOS switch is a matter of individual choice and a lot
of expert users agree with you, so I won't try to change your mind. Good
luck!
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64)
"Mike Y" <> wrote in message news:B9%pj.27$...
> Thanks. I understand the basic process (I've written partition handlers),
> but I
> was looking more for guidance with regards to Vista and XP, since Vista
> came
> 'pre-installed'.
>
> Years ago (back in DOS 5.0 days) I wrote a partition manager program after
> I
> discovered that my boss was coming into the office on weekends with his
> kids
> and letting them go into cubes and run games. I very quickly wrote a
> swapper
> that made my 100Meg HD into a 5Meg HD that had no room left so he wouldn't
> install any games....
>
> You'd think that the side effect would be I'd get a bigger hard disk
> ordered
> for
> me, but no.....
>
> Anyway, I'm gonna go with the BIOS switch, just to keep the original
> factory
> HD (with multiple partitions) 'stock'.
>
> Mike
>
>
> "R. C. White" <> wrote in message
> news:...
>> Hi, Mike.
>>
>> This question comes up often and we hate to keep typing the same long
>> response over and over. See the post I just made in the
>> vista.hardware_devices newsgroup, Subject: Can't dual boot back to xp
> need
>> help, started by "xp-vista-xp".
>>
>> The basic idea is simple enough, but there are so many possible
>> variations
>> that it takes a lot of words to cover them all.
>>
>> I've been dual-booting for nearly a decade and, as I said there, I prefer
>> the system Microsoft has built into every Windows version since at least
>> Win2K. It's basically like a "Y", with the System Partition at the base,
>> branching to multiple Boot Volumes. There's only one System Partition
>> and
>> it must be the Active primary partition on the boot device, as designated
> in
>> the BIOS. But there can be any number of Boot Volumes, each on a primary
>> partition or logical drive on any physical drive in the system.
>>
>> When we install the NEWEST operating system LAST, its Setup detects the
>> older installation and creates the dual-boot menu automatically. When we
>> install an older OS later, though, it messes up this scheme and we must
> then
>> run at least a part of the newer system's Setup again to let it
> re-establish
>> the dual-boot.
>>
>> Mixing IDE/SCSI/SATA hard drives can create more complications, but it
>> sounds like you are using two compatible SATA drives, so we can skip
>> those
>> caveats.
>>
>> Others prefer to use multiple System Partitions, one on each hard drive,
> and
>> use the BIOS to switch boot devices on reboot.
>>
>> Bottom line: it depends on how YOU want to set up and use YOUR computer.
>> ;^}
>>
>> RC
>>
>>
>> "Mike Y" <> wrote in message
> news:JpHoj.10$...
>> > I recently picked up a new desktop with a Core 2 Duo processor. I have
> it
>> > set
>> > up with Vista Home Premium on it's primary 350+Gig drive.
>> >
>> > But I have other stuff that HAS to run on XP or older. Business stuff.
>> > Work
>> > stuff. Stuff like hardware ICE setups, and BDM pods for uControllers.
>> >
>> > It was hard enough making some of that stuff run under XP. In some
> cases,
>> > I have 'custom' license files to make it work. And that's something I
>> > would
>> > probably have a real problem getting again for Vista, if I could at
>> > all.
>> >
>> > So, I bought another SATA hard drive, just over 250Gig. I figure put
>> > it
>> > in
>> > the system and set it up to dual-boot from the BIOS, with XP on the
> second
>> > drive.
>> >
>> > Or... Would I be better with a dual-boot off the main drive with a
>> > partition
>> > manager type program?
>> >
>> > Any ideas on which way to go with this?
>> >
>> > Mike
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