Vista & XP on Seperate Drives: Dual Boot?

SIMP

SIMP

Member
Looking for some help, please.

I have to separate drives. One with XP Pro 32-Bit and another with Vista Ultimate 32-Bit.

Is there anyway to make them dual boot and play nice together? I Originally wanted to keep the two OS totally separate but now I want to dual boot them.

I'm guessing that it may be too late since I installed them totally separate of each other. By that I mean when I installed XP it was the only drive in the PC during install. Same for the Vista installation.

Looking forward to your feedback and help on this. Thank you.
 
You'll have to reinstall one of the OS's.

I use a Ubuntu live boot cd to shrink the C: volume and create space for a partition.

Then install Vista on the partition. The dual boot option will appear at startup.
 
That's what I was expecting to hear.

If I had both HDD plugged in, could I select which HDD I wanted to boot from in the BIOS or boot menu and do it that way? Kind of a work-around, but it might work, huh?
 
You just need to setup the Vista boot loader to dual boot, no need to reinstall. There are some freeware gui-based tools on the internet to do it.
 
No problem, Bodaggit23. Just a misunderstanding.

So, do I hook both drives up and set the Vista HDD as the 1st boot device? Once I'm in Vista go ahead make the changes to the boot loader?

Any additional info would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
 
SIMP said:
Once I'm in Vista go ahead make the changes to the boot loader?
Click to expand...
Try EasyBCD. Many people find that one easy to setup dual boot in Vista.

Bodaggit23 said:
Without purchasing software?
Click to expand...
There are tons of freeware tools to copy/clone partitions. And after that you just need to setup the dual boot.

To add a bit: there can be some issues with lost drive letters when partitions are moved around. But that can be fixed also.
 
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