Dual-Boot Vista / WinXP - advice please!

[Malcolm H]

After a couple of weeks experience with Vista Home Premium I am impressed
and will continue to use it where possible. Unfortunately several of my
favourite programs which work well under WinXP will not work properly under
Vista.

My conclusion is that dual booting must be the answer, but how? I have 4
SATA internal disk drives, one with a WinXP boot partition, one with a Vista
boot partition and the other two for data, backups etc. Both operating
systems work fine (one at a time!) when plugged into the appropriate SATA
connector. Incidentally my motherboard has 4 SATA connectors, two of which
are stated to be suitable for a primary (boot) hard disk. Is there any way
of plugging XP into one, Vista into the other, and software switching
between the two? (Motheroard is Asus P5LD2 SE)

I have tried mechanically switching the required boot partition to the
recommended SATA connector on my motherboard (using a 4 pole wafer switch)
but, as one might expect, it does not work reliably (3GHz over a wafer
switch - yikes!). I would be satisfied with a 'patch panel' solution but
nowhere in the UK can I find a supplier of the necessary bits. There is a
supplier in Florida who has everything I want - but they only supply in the
USA. (www.satagear.com) The items which interest me are SATA extender cables
(male one end and female the other) and this CoolGear product
http://www.satagear.com/eSATA-SCSI-MPK1S_SATA_External_Cable.html. Neither
of these (or similar) appear to be available in the UK - unless hopefully
somebody knows better!

I have read everything I can find about software dual boot solutions but
they all seem to have some kind of 'gotcha' especially when the two OSs are
XP and Vista. There seem to be all kinds of risks of losing partitions or
data etc in the alleged solutions which I have read about so far - and they
all seem very complicated!?

All comments and observations will be avidly digested, thank you...

Malcolm

 

[Carl G]

Hi Malcolm
I have XP and Vista both on my pc. Both on separate hard drives. I have 3
sata drives installed. XP , Vista , and storage drive.
I just chose which OP I want on bootup,hit F4 or F8 ,whatever key YOU need
to bring up the boot popup option during boot.
Both OP systems also share the My documents folder on the storage drive.
Works great for me.
That way neither OP knows the other exists,no problems.
Hope this is of some help.

 

[Michael Jennings]

I think Acronis does it, but I don't know that one - I use BootItNG:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/examples.html
Select the 7th video down, third from the bottom - he's real quiet.

Here's a link on dual booting possibilities - the disconnect is one of 'em:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html

 

[CanaKiwi]

A solution that works for me is to download and install Virtual Server (it's
free) and install XP as a guest OS. That way I can launch it from within
Vista and do what ever I need to do under XP, whenever I need to do it.

 

[Malcolm H]

Eureka!! Thank you Carl, it's F8 for me. I've been sweating over this
problem for a week and the answer is so simple.

What a wonderful forum this newsgroup is, thank you again.

Malcolm

 

[Carl G]

Hi CanaKiwi
Does the Virtual server keep the boot files separate , so xp don't boot from
vista drive.
I have never used Virtual Server or the Virtual PC programs.
Perhaps I better find a link and read up on it.