Vista does not boot from second drive

[John]

Hi

I have win xp pro on my primary SATA drive. I installed vista on secondary
drive while the primary xp drive was switched off in the set-up, so the two
installs are completely separate. My problem is how to boot in win of my
choice at start-up. If I start normally it goes into xp. If I press F12 (its
a dell pc) it gives me choice of cd or hard drive boots. Selecting hard
drive boot takes me into xp. The only way I can go into Vista is to switch
off primary cp disk in set-up. Is there a solution for this dual boot
problem?

Thanks

Regards

 

[\NachtWacht\]

Hi

I have win xp pro on my primary SATA drive. I installed vista on secondary
drive while the primary xp drive was switched off in the set-up, so the two
installs are completely separate. My problem is how to boot in win of my
choice at start-up. If I start normally it goes into xp. If I press F12 (its
a dell pc) it gives me choice of cd or hard drive boots. Selecting hard
drive boot takes me into xp. The only way I can go into Vista is to switch
off primary cp disk in set-up. Is there a solution for this dual boot
problem?

Thanks

Regards

You can repair it with VistaBootPro.

 

[Guest]

To do bual boot the way that you are trying to do, the pc bios would have to
allow you to select which hard drive to boot.

 

[dobey]

Hi

I have win xp pro on my primary SATA drive. I installed vista on secondary
drive while the primary xp drive was switched off in the set-up, so the
two installs are completely separate. My problem is how to boot in win of
my choice at start-up. If I start normally it goes into xp. If I press F12
(its a dell pc) it gives me choice of cd or hard drive boots. Selecting
hard drive boot takes me into xp. The only way I can go into Vista is to
switch off primary cp disk in set-up. Is there a solution for this dual
boot problem?

Can you not select which particular physical hdd to boot from in the F12
menu?

You should have just installed Vista with your XP drive in place and it
would have automatically added you XP install to the boot menu.

Sure you need to nuke the Vista partition when you want to get rid of it,
but you can restore that at a later date.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have win xp pro on my primary SATA drive. I installed vista on
secondary drive while the primary xp drive was switched off in
the set-up, so the two installs are completely separate. My problem
is how to boot in win of my choice at start-up. If I start normally it
goes into xp. If I press F12 (its a dell pc) it gives me choice of cd
or hard drive boots. Selecting hard drive boot takes me into xp.
The only way I can go into Vista is to switch off primary cp disk
in set-up. Is there a solution for this dual boot problem?

Since each OS was installed in isolation from any other,
each has a mono-boot startup. And since they are on
separate hard drives, you can use the BIOS to set which
hard drive gets boot control (and thus, which OS is loaded).
Just go into the BIOS (by pressing DEL or F12), and set
which hard drive has highest priority in the Hard Drive Boot
Order (*not* the Device Boot Order). The Hard Drive Boot
Order prioritizes the hard drives only, and it determines which
hard drive's MBR will get control at startup. (The Device
Boot Order determines which *type* of device will get priority.)
The Hard Drive Boot Order may be called by different names,
such as "boot drive", depending on the BIOS. But whatever it's
called, its setting will persist in ROM from startup to startup, so
it's only necessary to set it when switching from one hard drive
(i.e. OS) to another. The Hard Drive Boot Order, by the way,
determines the meaning of "rdisk(x)" in WinXP's boot.ini file,
where "x" ranges in value from 0 to 3, where "0" indicates the
hard drive with the highest priority. In Vista, there is probably
a similar correspondence.

*TimDaniels*