multi boot

[Guest]

read somewhere that you can't have a dual boot system, xp and vista. Can you?
i have 2 sata drives and two ide drives.

 

[Alan Simpson]

Sure, you can dual boot with XP. Lotsa people here are doing it I imagine. I
did mine by creating two 40-gig partitions on a drive. Installed XP to one
partition first. Then booted to XP, inserted the Vista DVD and let it
autostart, then installed it to a separate partition. Went smooth as glass.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Yes and yes.

 

[mgm]

what vista beta version and where can I get it?

Sure, you can dual boot with XP. Lotsa people here are doing it I imagine.
I did mine by creating two 40-gig partitions on a drive. Installed XP to
one partition first. Then booted to XP, inserted the Vista DVD and let it
autostart, then installed it to a separate partition. Went smooth as
glass.

 

[Mark D. VandenBeg]

The program to register has been closed almost a month now. Wait for RC1.

And before you start typing "What is..." search the newsgroup. Same as
dual-booting.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

All builds of Vista from beta 1 have supported multi-booting. The present
beta 2 builds in use are 5384 and 5472. There will not be an opportunity
for new participants to get a copy of Vista until RC1 (Release Candidate 1)
comes out in a few weeks. If you did not enroll in the Customer Preview
Program a couple of months back then it is not clear that you can enroll in
the CPP when RC1 comes out. However, there may be other enrollments open in
addition to the CPP. Nothing has been announced yet, but keep watching
Microsoft.com.

 

[AJR]

The recommended procedure for dual boot setup has always been - install
older OS first (XP) then newer OS (Vista) - same as in the past - Win 98
first then XP.

 

[John Barnes]

The approach would very much depend on the layouts of your drives and
partitions thereon, and especially which is your system partition.

 

[John Barnes]

When you install XP to one of the other two partitions, you will add the XP
boot files on the Vista drive, but the Vista boot record should remain. The
boot record will be rewritten to point to ntldr. An approach that I would
try first, would be to download VistaBootPro http://www.vistabootpro.org/
and on the Boot loader panel, run the Reinstall the Vista bootloader step.
Add a legacy drive on the Manage OS entries page, and you should be set to
dual boot.

If you prefer, you should be able to run your Vista DVD and as you go thru
the steps to install Vista, there is a step that says fix or repair startup.
Run that. Some here have said it needs to be run up to 3 times.