Yest another dual boot question

Hi, I have two hard drives on my system, both 80GB. I have XP Pro on a 60GB
partition as C: on the first drive, the rest of the first drive is
unpartitioned space.
My second drive has a 20GB partition (F for data backup from C:, I also
have another 3GB partition (P for my virtual memory from my XP Pro on C:,
the remainder of the second drive is unpartitioned space (approx 57GB)
I want to install Vista on to the unpartitioned space on my second drive,
(thats how I have been playing around with XP Pro 64)
I see that Vista takes over the system (bit stupid really, having a beta
take over the system isn't it?) so when I decide to dump vista where does
this leave my XP Pro installation?
Cheers from Peter.

 

Sorry about these double postings, I was getting an error message syaing my
question could not be posted and to try again.

 

Peter: You must create another partition by carving out some free space on
either of your physical hard disks. I use BootItNG to manipulate my drives
and create free (unpartitioned) space. Once you have some free space set
aside (I suggest 15 to 20 GB) boot the computer with the Vista DVD and let
it do its thing. It'll eventually come to the place where you tell it where
to install Vista and the list it shows you of all your partitions will
inclides a listing for the free space you carved out of one of your hard
disks. Select that free space and Vista will do the rest. After its
complete you will be setup as dual boot. The boot screen will appear each
time your startup the computer and give you 30 seconds (default) to select
which OS you want to boot into.

HTH!

Doug

 

Doug, thanks for that, I had already got my installation under way. All the
important stuff on my XP Pro has been backed up on a usb drive (just in case)
so my installation was successful. I rather suspect I'll be installing XP Pro
64 as my second play OS very soon. I had it up and running "nearly" as good
as the 32 bit OS, the only let down was the lack of Palm device support.
Not too sure how to proceed with the removal of vista, but I'll wait and
read a few posts here, I'm sure there will be few on this matter.
Cheers from Peter.

 

I had the same issue:
download and install Vistabootpro on XP from
http://www.pro-networks.org/vistabootpro/
When you're done with Vista, run the app on XP
Next time you boot, there's no Vista boot - you're back to the "old XP
boot".
Before I did my install of Vista I backed up my XP boot files to a
folder just in case. As it turned out - VistabootPro worked fine.

 

thanks ed, I have now installed and wiped out my vista with no problems.
That's a very useful utility, vistabootpro. It would have been very messy
without it.
It was nice to have a little play with vista, but I don't think I will use
it until I have to
I find xp pro 64 to be a great os
Cheers