Installing/Dual-booting Vista with XP


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I have 2 HDs, C: and D:. Currently XP is installed and boots off C:. Id like to install Vista to D: and make avaliable the boot menu so I can choose between the two. How would I do that?

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Easy.. When u install Vista, it will ask you where you want to install it to, Choose D:\ ...then after that load it to that drive, then Voila Vista will do the rest for you (this is tested on Vista 5219)

P.S. you will have a grub type choice at the begining. :yes:

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Easy.. When u install Vista, it will ask you where you want to install it to, Choose D:\ ...then after that load it to that drive, then Voila Vista will do the rest for you (this is tested on Vista 5219)

P.S. you will have a grub type choice at the begining. :yes:

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If I want to uninstall/remove Vista then what?

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I use a program called Acronis Disk Director Suite for creating, deleting, renaming partitians. Very easy and if you want to delete your Acronis D:\ drive image it takes about ten seconds. Also Acronis True Image for making a backup of your Vista drive once you have it running nice and smooth so if you run into any major BSOD or major errors you can just delete and reinstall an image of your Vista drive when it was running good. You can restore the entire Vista image drive in about five minutes or less.

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But then wont my PC boot everytime with a boot menu that gives me the option between Vista and XP?

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The install procedure will backup your boot.ini file. Just restore the backup if/when you nuke Longhorn...er...Vista.

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Just format your D: drive :) simple.

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But then wont my PC boot everytime with a boot menu that gives me the option between Vista and XP?

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I have the same kind of set-up. I have XP on one hard drive and Vista on the other. Vista uses a different type of boot manager so its a little hard to set up at first. Make sure you install Vista with both HDs connected becuase then it will automatically write you a correct boot.ini. I point the boot sequence to the Vista hard drive and that some up with a selection to choose from XP or Vista. By default its XP and will timeout after 3 secs. It will then go to the XP HD and present me with another selection XP or Vista for some reason. Again it points to the XP HD and timesout after 3 secs. I don't really use Vista becuase my network card dosn't work on it hence no internet.

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I have the same setup but after i installed longhorn on my second drive it always booted into longhorn. It never gave me a boot manager and i could not boot into XP. I had to reinstall XP on my first disk. I rewrote the boot.ini file but it didnt work, i can't remember why though. I would really like to be able to dual boot XP and vista with out the use of third party software. any help would be usefull

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Just go into control panel /system/advanced/start up and recover options .( either in Vista or XP , it doesn't matter )

Here click on parameters , a new tab is here and you can have all set to use a dual boot option , in case your bootloader time out was set to zero before , you couldn't have choice at boot :-( Use 30s /30s for the 2 lines , that might be OK

Here you can edit your boot.ini without havin' to untick "read only " the properties of the normally hidden boot.ini ( nice and faster )

However , don't mess up with boot.ini !!!! It is required for the OS to boot !!!

Regards ,

N.A.R.

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