Dual boot with two hard drives

[TomC]

I have a new Presario 5210NX with Vista installed and no installation disks
provided (I have made system restore disks). I have another disk from my
failed computer with XP on it, and XP restore disks that came with it
(eMachine labelled disks). I have installed the old disk and the system
recognizes it, some of the programs on it will even open, but I would like to
be able to dual boot the two operating systems. I have tried changing the
disk selection in boot, but it changes back to the Vista drive. Any
suggestions?

 

[housetrained]

Have you pressed F8 on start up. This should give you the boot option.

 

[Lenster]

Have you pressed F8 on start up. This should give you the boot option.

Don't think thats going to do it. Yor Vista drive is Drive 0 and your
XP drive is drive 1.

1st problem. XP has a boot.ini. Among other things it identifies the
physical drive to boot from. If in your old machine, the XP HD was the
first one and now in your new machine it is the second one even if you
select the second drive in your BIOS if the BIOS does not change the
physical drive numbers, once it starts to boot and reads the boot.ini
it will revert to the first drive. In this case you may try You need
to edit the boot.ini in the root directory of the second drive. It
should look something like this:

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /usepmtimer /NoExecute=OptIn

You need to change both ocurrences of either disk or rdisk (i forget
which) from 0 to 1.
You can google it to find out.



2nd problem (more severe). WHn XP is installed it loaded chipset
dirvers unique to your old configuration. If you bought a new machine,
the chance are that XP won't run even if you do get it to boot.

You can google how to do a repair on XP which will re-install new
chipset drivers. But you need the XP install CD to do this.

If you have the install CD, try unplugging the first HD with Vista and
then boot from the XP install CD and do the repair install.

In short it might be a lot easier to wipe the second drive and install
XP as a dual boot under Vista. Then you could do as suggested by the
previous poster.

Good luck!

 

[Charlie Tame]

I have a new Presario 5210NX with Vista installed and no installation disks
provided (I have made system restore disks). I have another disk from my
failed computer with XP on it, and XP restore disks that came with it
(eMachine labelled disks). I have installed the old disk and the system
recognizes it, some of the programs on it will even open, but I would like to
be able to dual boot the two operating systems. I have tried changing the
disk selection in boot, but it changes back to the Vista drive. Any
suggestions?

The previous replies are good but I'd add another suggestion. There are
a couple of things that might nail you.

As pointed out your drive letter / number will be wrong in boot.ini but
may also be wrong in some registered programs in XP... you may get some
really bad interaction if something references say C:/program files/xxx
and changes something on your Vista setup.

Also, if you reinstall and set up dual boot you may find that the two
systems are not independent, so if one breaks and you have to format or
(Say) you remove the drive the other system won't boot anyway... there
goes you reserve capacity in the even of a catastrophic disk failure.

If you have two drives of the same kind (IDE or SATA) you could consider
a slide in mount and then simply turn off and swap the hardware. I find
this works very well without as much risk as having two in there
together but that's just a thought