XP/Vista....What Will Happen If......

SIMP

SIMP

Member
Hello All,
I have a question for ya and would appreciate any feedback, please. I use XP for my home PC. Last night I installed Vista on a totally separate Sata drive and had my XP drive unplugged from the motherboard during this Vista install. Basically, I wanted to install Vista on a drive by itself and make sure it didn't mess up my XP drive and was totally independent.

Well now I'm thinking I would like a dual boot setup. What will happen if I connect the XP drive and Vista drive to my MB and boot the PC? Will it give me a dual boot menu or will the drives conflict with each other since they were installed totally independent of each other? Thanks for any help you can provide!!
 
You can plug the drive in and it will all be fine, however you wont get a dual boot menu, the drive that boots will be dependent upon how your boot menu is setup. Generally your first device will be CD, then primary IDE, followed by secondary IDE or something like that, so depending on which drive is primary and which is secondary that will depend which Operating system boots. if you want a boot loader you will have to use a third party once such as LILO since both operating systems are on seperate physical drives.
 
I have my main rig set up like that (2 boot drives) you can just go into the bios and change the order of your boot drives to choose which one you want to boot into..
BTW, I'm even sharing my documents between them on a 3rd drive
 
That may be best anyway since my wife uses the PC also and the less choices she has to make, the better!! I can make the default drive the XP in BIOS but simply change it when I want to mess around with Vista. This will eliminate the dual boot screen for her.

In case I change my mind, how hard is it to use a third party boot loader like LILO? Thanks again!!
 
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Yeh thats probably your best bet then. Third party boot loaders like LILO and GRUB arent too bad to setup, but they can be tricky if you've never done anything like that before, they have to be written to the master boot record though so if something goes wrong you can risk having an unbootable operating system! (which can be fixed easily enough i should note)
 
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