XP and Vista dual boot

Hello
I am building a new system, I have Vista ultimate and XP Pro. I want them on separate hard
drives. I have been told to install XP on one HD, then while installing Vista it will ask me where
to put it, and just direct it to the second HD.

Any thoughts or suggestion are appreciated.

Richard

I have XP Pro installed on drive 0 and installed Vista Ultimate on drive 1
while signed into XP which has the advantage of defeating Vista's propensity
for re-lettering every drive.
So, yes, do as you said.
You might want to install a bootloader in XP to make life easier with the
dual boot. EasyBCD: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 or VistaBootPro:
http://www.vistabootpro.org/ These allow you to alter the boot order or
rename the systems.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate
"Richard" <> wrote in message
news:%...
> Hello
> I am building a new system, I have Vista ultimate and XP Pro. I want them
> on separate hard
> drives. I have been told to install XP on one HD, then while installing
> Vista it will ask me where
> to put it, and just direct it to the second HD.
>
> Any thoughts or suggestion are appreciated.
>
> Richard
>

Depends on what your future plans are. If your XP drive is the system drive
(first in boot order) then you will end up with your boot files for Vista
and XP on the XP drive. If, down the road you want to remove XP or Vista
you will have boot problems.
I would personally install XP, then disconnect the XP drive or change the
Vista drive to first in boot order before installing Vista. If you change
boot order you will have the most versatile system. You will be able to
boot with either drive first in boot order and with the Vista drive as your
system drive you will have dual boot capability.
This assumes you have full versions of both systems. If you have an upgrade
version of Vista you don't any longer have the license to use XP after
installing Vista.

"Richard" <> wrote in message
news:%...
> Hello
> I am building a new system, I have Vista ultimate and XP Pro. I want them
> on separate hard
> drives. I have been told to install XP on one HD, then while installing
> Vista it will ask me where
> to put it, and just direct it to the second HD.
>
> Any thoughts or suggestion are appreciated.
>
> Richard
>

Hi Richard
I tried putting Vista in charge, well I had to really because my new
system came with Vista startup image preloaded on the main drive in a
hidden partition.
Once I had Vista up and running, I installed my XP drive and used bios
boot selection to run one or the other. That worked fine but was a
pain, but necessary because some of my older programs were not
acceptable to Vista.
So I did some research and downloaded easyBCD and vistaboot pro, hoping
to be able to set up a dual boot selection without modifying the bios
each time I wanted to swap.
I never did get a stable system, although I tried all sorts of tricks.
The main problem was, with Vista in control, I could not re-install my
winXP to get rid of any problems, as on first re-boot during setup, the
XP drive would be lost.
The only way was to disconnect my Vista sata drive and then re-install
XP separately.
In the end, I gave up and reformatted the sata and loaded XP.

The one thing I could not do, is what you hope to do, that is load XP
first followed by Vista. I just didn't have a startup disk.

So, good luck. I think it might work, but you will be hardly getting
help from Microsoft, they are a bit one eyed about Vista.

I am still smarting from having to flush expensive software down the
toilet, so it might be a while before I try Vista again and only when
all suppliers have compatible drivers for their software.

Bobthequill


--
Bobthequill
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