Double boot.
- Thread starter Kill Bill
- Start date
There are a few different ways to dual boot OSs on one system. You can split one drive into two primary partitions for two OSs there. You can install a second or more OSs on more then one hard drive, And you can even have each OS seen on more then one drive remain a stand alone by not allowing the mbr on the first OS to see change there.
Being that Vista is a new OS it will want to be dominate over XP be default. In addition to that it uses a totally new boot loader and new editing tool for changing the default version or OS that will load automatically. For Vista the BCD editor instead of NotePad used to edit the boot.ini file is used for setting the boot order.
A free tool also developed for adding an OS to a Vista installation is called EasyBCD and recommended. Presently Vista is sharing a four hard drive system here with both XP Home and Pro versions. The Vista boot option for "previous version of Windows" was renamed with EasyBCD to Windows XP where then the boot.ini for XP Home on the first ide drive was set to load XP Pro on the first sata. It gets involved there.
The default appearance and desltop settings will see the new look and sidebar by default.
Being that Vista is a new OS it will want to be dominate over XP be default. In addition to that it uses a totally new boot loader and new editing tool for changing the default version or OS that will load automatically. For Vista the BCD editor instead of NotePad used to edit the boot.ini file is used for setting the boot order.
A free tool also developed for adding an OS to a Vista installation is called EasyBCD and recommended. Presently Vista is sharing a four hard drive system here with both XP Home and Pro versions. The Vista boot option for "previous version of Windows" was renamed with EasyBCD to Windows XP where then the boot.ini for XP Home on the first ide drive was set to load XP Pro on the first sata. It gets involved there.
The default appearance and desltop settings will see the new look and sidebar by default.
Don't understand. Explain it in simpler way. Do step by step
The first questions for you would be:
1)Do you have more then one hard drive or plan to dual on one alone?
2)Which version of Windows do you want to see auto boot with the option to load the other?
3)Are you familiar with partitioning and formatting hard drives?
Vista likes the first primary partition on a drive. When trying to install Vista along with XP on one drive it refused to install to a second partition created for it and ended replacing the XP installation there. For dual booting on a single drive you would want to install XP to a second primary created for it and later Vista on the first. It will then detect XP and add it into it's own boot loader(file that chooses OS to load).
The basic rule is to install the newer version of Windows regardless of version last otherwise it will usually replace the older version for upgrading. A dual boot of different versions or even different OSs is always a custom installation.