Help required with Dual Booting Windows XP

[Guest]

The hard disk on my PC consists of a 20 GB primary partition and the rest is
logical. Windows XP came preinstalled on my 20 GB primary partition. My aim
is to dual boot XP with Windows Vista Beta 2. I want to create another
separate primary partition for Vista Beta 2 and a additional partition or
logical drive for my data. Also, I want to be able to access my data from
both operating systems. I'm not too sure about doing this but I may attempt
to carry out this dual boot procedure using the steps below:

1. Using the Windows XP Disk Management tool under Computer Management, I
will right click the logical drive and space and select delete from the
context menu. This should convert this to free space.

2. Next, I would right click this unpartitioned or unallocated free space
and select New Partition from the context menu. From here, I would select a
primary partition, create a 30 GB size and format it using NTFS accordingly.
This partition or logical drive will be used to install Windows Vista Beta 2.

3. Then I would create a new logical drive for my data using the remaining
space.

4. Finally, I would restart the PC from my Windows Vista BETA 2 Installation
DVD, enter setup mode for that OS, and select the 30GB primary partition to
install Vista Beta 2.

Please note, I will not be using the Windows XP setup and fdisk tools to
partition my hard drive in this case as my PC came preinstalled with XP on a
customised 20 GB partition. Also, other third party software such as
Partition Magic are not available to me.

Please correct me if the above steps are incorrect as I'm not too sure how
to employ this dual boot procedure.

I would welcome any assistance from anybody out there.

Thanks,

Martin

 

[Guest]

Back up your data.

Remove the logical partition and its contents.

Create a second PRIMARY partition of at least 10GB.

Make this the ACTIVE partition. (This is very important)

Now install Vista.

You can select which to boot by changing the Active flag from one partition
to the other with FDISK, or you can install a bootmanager such as that with
Ranish, which will allow you to press '1' or '2' at startup.

 

[Guest]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the helpful response. Having read your comments and a web
article @
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...ddocs/en-us/dm_active_partition.mspx?mfr=true,
I have two outstanding queries. By making the Windows Vista primary
partition active; does this mean that this partition is then the system
partition and the computer will automatically reboot into this Vista
operating system at every restart or cold boot. Will the XP partition be
consider a boot partition but not a system partition? I was expecting a boot
load menu at startup where I choose between XP and Vista. I thought Vista
created a BCD (Boot Configuration Data) menu at startup similar to boot.ini
in Windows XP whereby the user could choose between OSs. In this case, the
boot menu at startup would default to Vista on top and the restricted time
option to select XP using the arrow keys in order to boot into XP.

Anyway, I won't be using the DOS fdisk utility to change the active flag
status for the purpose of changing the boot order of the OSs. It seems too
time consuming. I was expecting the easy quick boot loader menu at the PC
startup.

Any other suggestions.

Thanks

Martin