Dual booting Vista and XP such that the other is invisible?

[sam]

My desired setup is very simple:

Dirve 0: Primary Partition for current XP, another Primary Partition
for a new install of Vista
Drive 1: The data drive

I absolutely must have the data drive, Drive 1, be the D drive. I
have a lot of applications that expect to find the data there and I
need to switch between the two OS's seamlessly (I am a software
developer and testing in both OS's)

I have tried installing Vista twice now and both times the D drive is
the XP primary partition. It looks like Microsoft is using the XP
partition as the boot partition, even when booting Vista. The XP
partition is first, so I am not surprised.

What I need is some way of booting up so that the partition that XP is
on is hidden, which I know is one of the states a Primary partition
can be in. Back in years gone by, I did this with System Commander,
but there has to be a less expensive (free) way of doing it today.
Does anyone have any recommendations?

sam

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi sam,

You can't do it natively, you need a third party tool to hide each
installation from the other and make the data drive available to both. My
choice for these types of installs is BootIT NG from terabyteunlimited.com.
It's reasonably priced and will install to its own embrl volume. You can use
it as a boot manager and control which volumes load with each installation.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[PaulB]

You can change the XP drive to something other than D: while you are booted
to Vista with Disk Management, so that you can set your data drive to d:
I'm assuming that XP is the c: drive when you boot to it first and the data
drive is D: in XP..

 

[PaulB]

Also, when you dual boot, you make want to consider this article. It
effectively hides Vista from XP to allow Vista restore point to be uneffected
by XP.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926185

 

[Timothy Daniels]

My desired setup is very simple:

Dirve 0: Primary Partition for current XP, another Primary Partition
for a new install of Vista
Drive 1: The data drive

I absolutely must have the data drive, Drive 1, be the D drive. I
have a lot of applications that expect to find the data there and I
need to switch between the two OS's seamlessly (I am a software
developer and testing in both OS's)

I have tried installing Vista twice now and both times the D drive is
the XP primary partition. It looks like Microsoft is using the XP
partition as the boot partition, even when booting Vista. The XP
partition is first, so I am not surprised.

What I need is some way of booting up so that the partition that XP
is on is hidden, which I know is one of the states a Primary partition
can be in. Back in years gone by, I did this with System Commander,
but there has to be a less expensive (free) way of doing it today.
Does anyone have any recommendations?

sam

You can use Gparted to do that. But beware of the new Vista
partitioning "rules": http://www.multibooters.co.uk/partitions.html .
To avoid problems caused by mixing partition creation/deletion
utilities, create all partitions with XP or pre-Vista utilities. Vista
will accomodate to the old partitioning formats, but not the other
way around. So create the partition(s) for Vista with Gparted,
and then install Vista into that pre-made partition. Thereafter, you
can use Gparted to "hide" and "un-hide" whichever partition you
want. Gparted is available as a free downloadable .iso file to
make a live CD, or a .zip file to make a live USB (if your PC
is one of the newer ones which can boot from a USB device).
I initially had trouble in the selection of parameters during the
startup of Gparted, but it all worked out when I selected the
"Medium Experience" option (no. "1") and said not to autodetect
the graphics card. All other selections were the default, and it
works fine. Various flags may be set for a partition with the Flag
Management function, including the "active" flag (called "boot")
and the "hide" flag.
Here's the webpage for the live CD:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php .
Here's the webpage for the live USB:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php

*TimDaniels*

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You should be able to do what you are describing if you install Vista from
the XP desktop rather than by booting with the Vista dvd. That should force
Vista Setup to recognize the drive enumeration the same as XP is. Get your
drive letters set up in XP first.