Dual Booting Vista RC2 with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

[Joseph Sankar]

I am currently running Vista RC2 in a virtual machine, but since I have a
lot of extra space on my hard drive, I want to dual boot Vista with XP. Is
this a good idea? I have a Dell Dimension E510 with a 120 GB hard drive. I
want all my hardware to work, so is there any hardware compatibilty list for
Vista? Also, are there any free partitioning utilities that I can use to
partition my hard drive/resize my Windows XP partition? Any help would be
appreciated.

 

[Robert R. Johnson Jr]

I am currently dual booting Vista RC2 and Windows XP. I have my primary
drive paritioned in half. Half for XP and half for Vista. There are many
partition tools available at low cost on the Internet. This is the one I
use:

http://partition-manager.com/demo.htm

regards
Robert

 

[Guest]

I am currently dual booting Vista RC2 and Windows XP. I have my primary
drive paritioned in half. Half for XP and half for Vista. There are many
partition tools available at low cost on the Internet. This is the one I
use:

http://partition-manager.com/demo.htm

regards
Robert

 

[Guest]

Maybe I'm dense, but I've read every discussion there is about dual boot, and
I still can't get it to a boot option menu.

I have Windows XP SP2 on my C: drive and Windows Vista RC2 (Build 5744) on
my D: drive (logical drive) partition. I tried loading Vista from XP and
booting directly from the DVD. In both cases I get no options to select which
OS I want to use.

I tried the olf F8 thing, but this just puts the machine to sleep until I
hit a key. I have tried using VistaBootPro and EasyBCD but it seems they
only allow me to restore to one of the OS's listed.

Can anybody shed some light on my darkness?

 

[Guest]

from what you are saying it sounds that you did an upgrade, not a clean
install. if you did a clean install Vista should have asked where do you want
to install it, and at the same time you could have used Vista to partition
your drive and specify where to install it to. if you did not see any of that
you moust ikely did an upgrade, in which case there is no more XP. if you
want XP back im afraid you will have to re-install. and if you want to
dual-boot, then you will have to re-install Vista; but a CLEAN install this
time.

 

[Robert R. Johnson Jr]

You can ONLY dual boot Vista and an old operating system if both are
installed into the primary drive. In other words as an example I had my C:
drive which is what I used for Windows XP. My hard drive is 160 gigs. I used
a partitioning tool and made a partitioned drive (into half) which I named
with the drive letter of V (for vista). My C drive is now 80 gigs and V is
80 gigs. I installed Vista into drive V. You can not install Vista into a
separate drive apart from the primary drive and expect to dual boot. It just
doesn't work that way unfortunately.

regards
Robert

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

You can ONLY dual boot Vista and an old operating system if both are
installed into the primary drive. In other words as an example I had my C:
drive which is what I used for Windows XP. My hard drive is 160 gigs. I
used a partitioning tool and made a partitioned drive (into half) which I
named with the drive letter of V (for vista). My C drive is now 80 gigs
and V is 80 gigs. I installed Vista into drive V. You can not install
Vista into a separate drive apart from the primary drive and expect to
dual boot. It just doesn't work that way unfortunately.

regards
Robert

Actually, if you use a third party boot manager, you can have
(theoretically) as many operating systems you want scattered across as many
hard drives your system can handle, so long as they are internal and the
O/S's are installed in primary or logical partitions. You can get very
fancy and hide various partitions from any one of the O/S's, name your
default O/S, that sort of thing. BootMagic has been working very well for
me and there are also a few freeware solutions..

But, aside from this exception, you are absolutely correct. The only thing
I would add is that it seems to work better if you have the older O/S
installed to a partition that is physically before the newer one, especially
with Vista. In the example of dual-booting XP and Vista, this allows Vista
to install its boot manager onto the XP partition so that the user is
presented with a choice of XP or Vista at system power-up.

 

[Guest]

Actually, you can do it that way. I am doing it with XP Pro on one drive and
Vista on another.

 

[Guest]

I got the demo version, but how can I get it to work? I think you have to
format the disk, then choose your partitions. I don't want to do that. I
want to make a partition out of my free space. Is there any way to make a
partition out of free space

 

[Guest]

I got the demo version, but how can I get it to work? I think you have to
format the disk, then choose your partitions. I don't want to do that. I
want to make a partition out of my free space. Is there any way to make a
partition out of free space?

 

[Guest]

I got the demo version, but how can I get it to work? I think you have to
format the disk, then choose your partitions. I don't want to do that. I
want to make a partition out of my free space. Is there any way to make a
partition out of free space?

 

[Guest]

Point of clarification.

It is possible to dual boot from 2 different physical drives.

My current setup is XP on C: (250 GB drive). I partitioned a different drive
(200 GB) and use one of these partitions for Vista. Everything works fine.
During the install I told Vista to install on one of the partitions on my 2nd
drive and I now have a boot option at the start for either OS. No third
party boot managers!

Jeff

 

[Guest]

Point of clarification.

It is possible to dual boot from 2 different physical drives.

My current setup is XP on C: (250 GB drive). I partitioned a different drive
(200 GB) and use one of these partitions for Vista. Everythign works fine.
During the install I told Vista to install on one of the partitions on my 2nd
drive and I now have a boot option at the start for either OS. No third
party boot mamagers!

Jeff

 

[Guest]

NTLOADER needs to be on the primary drive, the OS' can be on any
drive/partition you wish. I myself have both Vista and XP Pro on my secondary