"John" wrote:
> I have win xp pro on my primary SATA drive. I installed vista on
> secondary drive while the primary xp drive was switched off in
> the set-up, so the two installs are completely separate. My problem
> is how to boot in win of my choice at start-up. If I start normally it
> goes into xp. If I press F12 (its a dell pc) it gives me choice of cd
> or hard drive boots. Selecting hard drive boot takes me into xp.
> The only way I can go into Vista is to switch off primary cp disk
> in set-up. Is there a solution for this dual boot problem?
Since each OS was installed in isolation from any other,
each has a mono-boot startup. And since they are on
separate hard drives, you can use the BIOS to set which
hard drive gets boot control (and thus, which OS is loaded).
Just go into the BIOS (by pressing DEL or F12), and set
which hard drive has highest priority in the Hard Drive Boot
Order (*not* the Device Boot Order). The Hard Drive Boot
Order prioritizes the hard drives only, and it determines which
hard drive's MBR will get control at startup. (The Device
Boot Order determines which *type* of device will get priority.)
The Hard Drive Boot Order may be called by different names,
such as "boot drive", depending on the BIOS. But whatever it's
called, its setting will persist in ROM from startup to startup, so
it's only necessary to set it when switching from one hard drive
(i.e. OS) to another. The Hard Drive Boot Order, by the way,
determines the meaning of "rdisk(x)" in WinXP's boot.ini file,
where "x" ranges in value from 0 to 3, where "0" indicates the
hard drive with the highest priority. In Vista, there is probably
a similar correspondence.
*TimDaniels*
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