Installing Vista on a new drive

[Oenone]

I've just bought a new SATA hard drive to add to the one I already have in
my PC. At present I'm using Win XP Pro and am keen to try Vista, but not so
keen that I'm prepared to wipe out my existing and working XP installation.

So I'm planning on disconnecting the power to my WinXP drive and installing
Vista on the other drive. Once this is complete I'll re-connect the WinXP
drive and will switch between the two versions of Windows by selecting the
primary boot HD in my BIOS settings.

Does anyone see any potential problems with this?

I know I could install Vista on the same drive as WinXP and use the boot
menu, but I'd really rather completely remove my WinXP drive from the
picture whilst installing Vista. I also very much doubt I have the space
left on my current drive to install Vista.

Or is there some other better way of doing this that I'm overlooking?

Thanks,

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You can install Vista on a second drive and also get the boot options menu.
If you want the boot options menu, then do not disconnect any drives.
Installing Vista to a different drive or partition will not wipe out XP. I
am not suggesting that you dual boot, but Vista is XP-aware. I suggest you
explore using a third party boot manager instead of fiddling with the BIOS
everytime you want to change systems. There have been many discussions on
here, so use your search.

 

[Roy Coorne]

I've just bought a new SATA hard drive to add to the one I already have in
my PC. At present I'm using Win XP Pro and am keen to try Vista, but not so
keen that I'm prepared to wipe out my existing and working XP installation.

So I'm planning on disconnecting the power to my WinXP drive and installing
Vista on the other drive. Once this is complete I'll re-connect the WinXP
drive and will switch between the two versions of Windows by selecting the
primary boot HD in my BIOS settings.

Does anyone see any potential problems with this?

I followed exactly the procedure which you describe, in several
installations (RC1, RC2 b5744), and it works fine. See no probs.

I know I could install Vista on the same drive as WinXP and use the boot
menu, but I'd really rather completely remove my WinXP drive from the
picture whilst installing Vista. I also very much doubt I have the space
left on my current drive to install Vista.

Or is there some other better way of doing this that I'm overlooking?

I know no better way.

Thanks,

UR welcome -

Roy

 

[Ray]

I did that with my installation and it works just fine, I'm actually going
into XP less these days. I have an added "bonus" feature in that my
motherboard (Asus) supports multi booting via a menu accessed by pressing f8
during the post. It is just as easy as if I had a dual boot menu.

Ray