dual-boot?

seanandnik

seanandnik

New Member
I recently built a new rig with 2 320 gb hdd's. I partitioned both drives the same, part.1 30gb, part.2 290 gb. I loaded xp on hdd 1, part. 1. Now where should I load Vista? both OS's on the same disc, but diff. partitions? or use hdd 1 for xp and hdd 2 for vista? if i split them on seperate hdds and want to add a drive later to vista how can i do this? also formatted with ntfs, is this a prob? sorry for all the questions but thanks in advance for the help.
 
Let's see? I currently have XP Home on the WD 250gb primary ide, Vista Home Premium on the WD 250gb secondary ide, and XP Pro on the WD 500gb sata drive. All three have single NTFS primary partitions on each one. Originally the 500gb sata was going to be used strictly for storage and backup but Vista for some reason refused to install to the second primary partition on the second ide drive.

Once you start installing your programs you will find that the 30gb at the front end won't have much room for anything. You are better off using a single primary on each and add a third drive for storage. But you should at least give yourself 80gb to 100gb on the first partition to allow for immediate access as well as plenty of room for adding new programs. That will also allow more space for virtual memory usage. Make sure XP goes on first since Vista will automatically write a new mbr no matter which drive it is installed onto. You can dual boot on the same drive with two large primaries. But if that drive fails you lose both versions. If on separate drives you can simply repair the mbr for either. Your choice there.
 
1. You want them to be NTFS.
2. I would, if i could, repartition the first drive to equal parts and then use both for the OSes. Otherwise, use the first partition on the second drive. If that doesnt work and doesnt boot, then use the other partition on the first drive.
 
I would agree with burgerbob on this one as i just did the same thign with my pc. It is critical that you install xp first and then vista second for the new bootloader in vista to pick up the xp and then you will be good to go...
 
The first thing to do is review the few articles out on dual OSing your system with both XP and Vista to be familiar with the methods used. The links here will cover a great deal on how to go about this. The info on adding XP later seems to fail when you run across that. The VistaBootPRO and EasyBCD programs were both tried here to add XP Pro on a sata drive into the Vista boot loader seeing no results. Vista was installed THREE TIMES! to finally see both XP Home and Pro installations included for the triple boot here.

One multiple page article is seen at http://www.windowstalk.org/dual_boot_vista.htm

The second article here goes into using GParted to prepare the drive partitions for the dual OSing. Yet Vista now can shrink and reformat partitions when booting up with the installation disk. Is MS finally getting smart? Or are they worried about Linux tools! :P http://apcmag.com/4054/how_to_dual_boot_xp_and_vista

The last link here has some tools for dual booting or even triple booting XP, Vista, and Linux as well the dreaded VistaBootPRO. http://lifehacker.com/software/dual-boot/
 
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