With duel boot -- what is best place to put Vista

[Stan Hilliard]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

 

[Stan Hilliard]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

Please forgive the bad grammar in Q2.
Stan

 

[HEMI-Powered]

Today, Stan Hilliard made these interesting comments ...

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the
Vista partition next to the XP partition or put it on my
second drive? Or does it make any difference.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that
start within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

Love the play on words - "duel" vs. "dual". A "dual" boot PC
running XP and Vista would allow you to "duel" one O/S vs the other
and see for yourself which you like the best, albeit double the
overall HD space unless you point both systems to the same
installed apps.

 

[Dennis McCunney]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Haven't played with Vista yet, but my preference is to put each OS on a
seperate drive. I dual boot 2K Pro SP4 and XP Pro SP@ here. 2K boots
from an IDE drive. XP boots from a RAID 0 SATA array.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

As I recall, the question isn't where the OS is installed, it's where
the boot sector code is located that will load the OS. The last I knew,
that had to be within the first 2GB of the primary HD. The rest of the
OS could be elsewhere, but the boot code had to be in the stated region.

This is OS dependant, however: I recall that OS/2 was not subject to
that limitation, and could be put pretty much wherever you wanted.)

(I used to run an app called System Commander that was designed to let
you multiboot by managing the boot code placement for you. I used it to
dual-boot Win9X and Linux.)

MS is offering free virtualization software you might want to look at.
I'm not interested because it will only work with MS OSes, and I'm
interested in putting things like Linux and Solaris in the mix, but it
might be a good solution for you.)

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

______
Dennis

 

[Jim]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

either way will work.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

From Win 2000 on, the need to put the OS partition within the 1st 2/8GB
is gone.

 

[mikeyhsd]

if you intend to remove others and leave only vista in the future, it would be \best to have vista on the first hard drive first partition.
if you intend on keeping more than vista in permanent use then it does not really matter.
just remember the first drive first partition usually contains the boot information.
including the multi boot info for vista.



(e-mail address removed)



Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

 

[GreenieLeBrun]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

First off it's dual not duel.

In my dual boot system I have installed Vista to the second HDD.

One thing to remember though is that with a dual boot XP-Vista box each time
you boot into XP it will delete your Vista restore points.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Makes no difference, as long as each OS has at least a partition to
itself. If there's a speed difference between the two hard drives,
though, it might help your performance marginally if you were to place
Vista on the faster drive.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

No, that restriction died with WinNT 4.0, may it Rest in Peace.


--

Bruce Chambers

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[Rock]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Doesn't matter. Best practice install older OS first (XP) then newer.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

No

Additional

There are several ways to run both XP and Vista and issues you need to be
aware of with Vista restore points, shadow copies and backups. If XP can
see the partition where Vista is installed, when XP is booted, it will
delete the Vista restore points, shadow copies and certain backups created
in Vista. If you regularly image the system for backup using something like
Acronis True Image or Complete PC backup in Vista Business or Ultimate then
this isn't much of a problem. Otherwise it reduces your options for
repairing problems.

There are ways to avoid this to hide the Vista partition such as using
Bitlocker (only in Vista Business or Ultimate) or use a 3rd party boot
manager

One way is to install Vista second and let the Vista boot loader set up the
dual boot. Another is to install on different hard drives and use a 3rd
party boot loader. This has some advantages.

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html

A third way is to install on different drives and select which drive to boot
from via the BIOS.

You should scan the posts in the Vista newsgroups which is where this
question should be posted. Look at dual boot posts in
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general
microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup

Do a Google groups search for the info.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

Vista newsgroups:
microsoft.public.windows.vista.administration_accounts_password
microsoft.public.windows.vista.file_management
microsoft.public.windows.vista.games
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general
microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices
microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup
microsoft.public.windows.vista.mail
microsoft.public.windows.vista.music_pictures_video
microsoft.public.windows.vista.networking_sharing
microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance
microsoft.public.windows.vista.print_fax_scan
microsoft.public.windows.vista.security

 

[Stan Hilliard]

Doesn't matter. Best practice install older OS first (XP) then newer.


No

Additional

There are several ways to run both XP and Vista and issues you need to be
aware of with Vista restore points, shadow copies and backups. If XP can
see the partition where Vista is installed, when XP is booted, it will
delete the Vista restore points, shadow copies and certain backups created
in Vista. If you regularly image the system for backup using something like
Acronis True Image or Complete PC backup in Vista Business or Ultimate then
this isn't much of a problem. Otherwise it reduces your options for
repairing problems.

I have just installed True Image Workstation 9.1 which should solve
that.

There are ways to avoid this to hide the Vista partition such as using
Bitlocker (only in Vista Business or Ultimate) or use a 3rd party boot
manager

I plan to use Partition Magic's BootMagic, hiding the non-current boot
partitions.

One way is to install Vista second and let the Vista boot loader set up the
dual boot. Another is to install on different hard drives and use a 3rd
party boot loader. This has some advantages.

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html

A third way is to install on different drives and select which drive to boot
from via the BIOS.

You should scan the posts in the Vista newsgroups which is where this
question should be posted. Look at dual boot posts in
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general
microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup

Do a Google groups search for the info.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

Vista newsgroups:
microsoft.public.windows.vista.administration_accounts_password
microsoft.public.windows.vista.file_management
microsoft.public.windows.vista.games
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general
microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices
microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup
microsoft.public.windows.vista.mail
microsoft.public.windows.vista.music_pictures_video
microsoft.public.windows.vista.networking_sharing
microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance
microsoft.public.windows.vista.print_fax_scan
microsoft.public.windows.vista.security

Thanks Rock for the references,
Stan Hilliard

 

[Rock]

Replies inline

I have just installed True Image Workstation 9.1 which should solve
that.

I don't know about that version for it's Vista compatibility. Version 10 is
compatible.

I plan to use Partition Magic's BootMagic, hiding the non-current boot
partitions.

Do not use BootMagic. It is not compatible with Vista. Either is Partition
Magic. Do no use it to create partitions for Vista. There will be
problems. Acronis Disk Director Suite and BootIT NG currently are Vista
compatible.

You're welcome. Have fun with Vista.

 

[Malcolm Cheyne]

Stan

I have just gone through the experience (yesterday)

Just a summary from the other posts.....

HDD or partition: your choice.
Partition Magic (I even have it but cannot use. Not compatible).
I found a post for "EasyBCD" (google for it) and used that. Works a
charm.
Warning!! Don't change setting back to XP only. Won't get your Vista
boot option back.


HTH

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Q1 - When duel booting XP and Vista, is it best to put the Vista
partition next to the XP partition or put it on my second drive? Or
does it make any difference.

Q2 - Do XP-Pro and Vista required to be in partitions that start
within the first X GB of the disk? If so, what is X?

Information will be appreciated,
Stan Hilliard

In the long run, the method with the least potential for headache
is to put each OS on its own hard drive. Install them separately,
with the other OS's HD disconnected, and each HD will be setup
for a mono-boot. At startup, select which HD gets boot precedence
by setting the HD boot order in the BIOS. The OS on that HD
will boot. The running OS will call its own partition "C:", and it will
call the other OS's partition something else, but as long as there are
no shortcuts that reference other partitions, that doesn't matter.
Doing the dual-boot via the BIOS setting makes the eventual
removal of one of the OSes much easier - just reformat its partition
and <Poof!> it's gone, and no worries about adjusting the boot files.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Rock]

In the long run, the method with the least potential for headache
is to put each OS on its own hard drive. Install them separately,
with the other OS's HD disconnected, and each HD will be setup
for a mono-boot. At startup, select which HD gets boot precedence
by setting the HD boot order in the BIOS. The OS on that HD
will boot. The running OS will call its own partition "C:", and it will
call the other OS's partition something else, but as long as there are
no shortcuts that reference other partitions, that doesn't matter.
Doing the dual-boot via the BIOS setting makes the eventual
removal of one of the OSes much easier - just reformat its partition
and <Poof!> it's gone, and no worries about adjusting the boot files.

This doesn't address the loss of restore points in Vista when XP is booted,
does it?

 

[Bob I]

This doesn't address the loss of restore points in Vista when XP is
booted, does it?

That would be the dueling part! ;-)

 

[Timothy Daniels]

This doesn't address the loss of restore points in Vista when XP
is booted, does it?

My guess is that it would not unless one "hid" the unused OS's
partition with a utility such as Partition Magic (or its equivalent that
works with Vista). But that is only a guess since I don't understand
how one OS affects another OS's "restore" function in the first place.
Where is the "restore" data kept such that both OSes would look
for it in the same physical location? Care to illucidate on that?

*TimDaniels*

 

[Rock]

My guess is that it would not unless one "hid" the unused OS's
partition with a utility such as Partition Magic (or its equivalent that
works with Vista). But that is only a guess since I don't understand
how one OS affects another OS's "restore" function in the first place.
Where is the "restore" data kept such that both OSes would look
for it in the same physical location? Care to illucidate on that?

*TimDaniels*

Yes the way to prevent it is to hide the Vista partitions from XP. The
restore points for each OS are kept in the same folder structure. When XP
runs it's version of volsnap.sys sniffs all these folders for restore
points. The Vista created ones are different, however, Volsnap.sys doesn't
recognize them, and to protect system restore integrity it deletes them and
along with it goes the shadow copies and some of the backups created in
Vista.

 

[Rock]

That would be the dueling part! ;-)

Yep!

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Yes the way to prevent it is to hide the Vista partitions from XP.
The restore points for each OS are kept in the same folder structure.
When XP runs it's version of volsnap.sys sniffs all these folders for
restore points. The Vista created ones are different, however,
Volsnap.sys doesn't recognize them, and to protect system restore
integrity it deletes them and along with it goes the shadow copies
and some of the backups created in Vista.

Do you think MS will consider this a bug and issue a patch for it?

*TimDaniels*

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Yes the way to prevent it is to hide the Vista partitions from XP.
The restore points for each OS are kept in the same folder structure.
When XP runs it's version of volsnap.sys sniffs all these folders for
restore points. The Vista created ones are different, however,
Volsnap.sys doesn't recognize them, and to protect system restore
integrity it deletes them and along with it goes the shadow copies
and some of the backups created in Vista.

This implies that the running OS does either (or both) of the following:
1) It inspects ALL other partitions for restore points,
2) It finds ALL other Windows OSes in the system and looks
for their restore points.

In other words, the OS (via volsnap.sys) doesn't just look at its
own restore points in its own partition. Why would an OS do that?

*TimDaniels*