Vista on new drive/ xp on existing drive

[John]

Hi

I have a primary xp sata drive which I want to connect as secondary. I want
to connect a new sata drive as primary and then install vista on it form
scratch. Will the new setup vista on sata primary and xp on sata secondary
allow me to dual boot between xp and vista and still allow access to either
drive from either os?

If not, am I better off installing the new sata drive as secondary and
install vista on it, and leave existing primary xp drive as it is?

Thanks

Regards

 

[Michael Jennings]

If XP can see Vista, it will corrupt Vista's restore points when XP boots.
Hiding Vista from XP but letting Vista see XP would be a real challenge.
If Vista restore points don't matter to you, then let Vista installation set up
the dual boot with its boot manager - let it decide on primary & secondary.

 

[John]

So do I switch xp primary disk to secondary position before installing vista
on new drive primary position, or leave xp at primary position and insert
the new drive for vista at secondary position?

Thanks

Regards

 

[Steve Easton]

XP primary and Vista secondary.
Especially since XP was installed as primary or disk 0.

 

[Michael Jennings]

If you want XP to boot, after whatever switching you do, check
to see that XP boots. If XP can boot, then boot the Vista DVD
and tell install you want Vista on the new drive. Vista's boot manager
will go on the primary drive, very likely XP's. Both Vista and XP will
claim to have C: drive, wherever they are. You can boot either.

 

[John]

Thanks. What happens if xp primary disk fails in future? Will it take down
vista boot as well? Any solution to that once it happens or before?

Thanks again

Regards

 

[Michael Jennings]

Considering time more important than cash, most in this group
prefer Acronis drive imaging to BootItNG drive imaging. If getting
the data back doesn't matter, then a fresh install of XP followed
by installing VistaBootPro in XP would re-enable dual booting:
http://www.vistabootpro.org/
Google Acronis or BootItNG if drive imaging interests you.

Have you looked into virtualization? That would let you run both
XP and Vista at the same time. You may prefer OE to WinMail,
for example. Some virtualizers: VMWare, Virtual PC, VirtualBox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines

 

[Peter in New Zealand]

Considering time more important than cash, most in this group
prefer Acronis drive imaging to BootItNG drive imaging. If getting
the data back doesn't matter, then a fresh install of XP followed
by installing VistaBootPro in XP would re-enable dual booting:
http://www.vistabootpro.org/
Google Acronis or BootItNG if drive imaging interests you.

Have you looked into virtualization? That would let you run both
XP and Vista at the same time. You may prefer OE to WinMail,
for example. Some virtualizers: VMWare, Virtual PC, VirtualBox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines

Hello. I have Vista and Windows 2000 installed on two separate physical
drives, and the bios on my machine allows me to set the boot order of the
drives. Mostly I use Vista, but I can pop into the bios, reverse the boot
order, and the machine happily boots up from the W2K drive. I installed each
completely independently of the other, with the drive not in use physically
disconnected at the time of installation, so each seems to think it is the
only OS on the machine.

Don't know if your machine can do this, but if it can this might be worth a
thought. Hope this helps.

 

[Andy]

Hi

I have a primary xp sata drive which I want to connect as secondary. I want
to connect a new sata drive as primary and then install vista on it form
scratch. Will the new setup vista on sata primary and xp on sata secondary
allow me to dual boot between xp and vista and still allow access to either
drive from either os?

If not, am I better off installing the new sata drive as secondary and
install vista on it, and leave existing primary xp drive as it is?

If you're dead set on making the new disk the one that the BIOS boots,
do the following:
1. Connect it as secondary, and boot Windows XP.
2. Run Disk Management, create the primary partition on the new disk,
format the partition, and set the partition active.
3. Copy ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini from the XP system partition
to the primary partition on the new disk.
4. Edit the boot.ini on the new disk, changing all occurrences of
rdisk(0) to rdisk(1).
5. Connect the new disk as the first one, and the XP disk as the
second one.
6. Boot the computer from the new disk to verify that XP boots.

Now you can install Vista on the new disk and get dual boot.

 

[Michael Jennings]

I think that was the info John was trying to get out of me, Andy,
the anticipated problem being to effortlessly pull the plug on XP.
Thanks for posting it - your item number six is most important.