Select Boot Drive?

[LMO]

Aloha all. I just bought a new Dell system. It came with Vista. I hated it,
wiped the drive, and installed XP. I'm thinking of buying a 2nd drive, and
installing the original OS on to the new drive, then, upon bootup, selecting
either XP or Vista. Is this possible? The new system is SATA. Does this
matter for what I'm thinking of?
Thanks!

 

[Not Me]

Usually if the restore disk will work on a different HDD, it restores the
system to the exact state it left the factory.
That would preclude dual boot without a third party boot utility.
If you have an actual Vista DVD inbstead of a restore disk, that should
work.
Just boot from the DVD and follow the onscreen instructions, but be aware
that booting to XP will kill any Vista restore points unless you have
bitlocker working or a utility to hide Vista from XP.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

"LMO" wen' write:

Aloha all. I just bought a new Dell system. It came with Vista. I hated it,
wiped the drive, and installed XP. I'm thinking of buying a 2nd drive, and
installing the original OS on to the new drive, then, upon bootup, selecting
either XP or Vista. Is this possible? The new system is SATA. Does this
matter for what I'm thinking of?
Thanks!

Ey, bra! Da mohss easy way fo' do diss eez inside da BIOS whan
you staht up. Juss sat da Hahd Drive Boot Orda (not da Device
Boot Orda - da HAHD DRIVE Boot Orda), an' da hahd drive at
da top uh da leest goeen be da hard drive dat boot. Juss instaw
da originaw Veesta whan da 2nd hahd drive eez da ONLY hard
drive een da seestem. Daa way, each OS teenk ees da only OS
een da seestem whan it gat da seegnow from da BIOS to staht up,
an' no need scroo aroun' weed dual-boot an' aw dat pilikia. Een
udda words, make da BIOS do yoah dual-booteeng fo you.

*TeemDaniowz*

 

[LMO]

I'm Hawaiian, not Jamaican, Mahn!
But tanks for de advice!

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Ah! I've always wanted a tank. Two would be even better!

Normally, for dual-booting with Windows OSes, one would
install the later OS last, letting the installation routine formulate
the dual-boot menu and directives (such as the boot.ini file in the
case of WinXP) for you that would include the older OSes that
the installer finds in the system. In your case, if you really have a
Vista *installation* CD, you could do just that, and you'd end up
with a dual-boot scenario. But if you really just have an image of an
installed Vista that is bundled together with an image-restoration utility,
you'd just be restoring a mono-boot to the 2nd HD. If you had a
mix of Windows NT/2K/XP, this could easily be remedied by editing
the boot.ini file that controls booting to make it include the other OSes.
But the control of multi-booting in Vista is handled in a new and more
complex way, and it's usually left to installation software to formulate,
so installing WinXP after the Vista installation has already been done just
screws up the Vista boot process. To avoid that, and since each of
your OSes will be on a separate HD, I suggested that you let each OS
load as a mono-boot and tell the BIOS which HD to pass control to
for booting.

*TimDaniels*