Dual booting help...

yantorsen · 15 Oct 2007 at 20:24

I have got Vista home premium 64-bit, and it seems that all my older games like medieval 2 total war, and aoe3 are not compatible.

SO I want to dual boot with xp pro. thing is I have no idea how.

And is it possible to keep my exsisting vista install, or will i have to start from scratch?

how do drivers work over two os's?

Just want some general info on how to dual boot really, pros/cans etc...

Thanks
Yanto.

Admiral Huddy · 15 Oct 2007 at 20:41

You need to install the OSs on two different partitions. That way they don't interfere with each other. The drivers are loaded into it's respective partition.

As far as i know, in order to set-up dual boot, you have to install the OS in chronological order. That is to say, XP first in to one partition, then Vista into the other. When installing Vista, it will see that there is an older OS, and give you the option to load into another partition..

yantorsen · 15 Oct 2007 at 20:44

Admiral Huddy said:
You need to install the OSs on two different partitions. That way they don't interfere with each other. The drivers are loaded into it's respective partition.

As far as i know, in order to set-up dual boot, you have to install the OS in chronilogical order. That is to say, XP first in to one partition, then Vista into the other. When installing Vista, it will see that there is an older OS, and give you the option to load into another partition..

so when you setup xp, i just set the xp partition size as say 40gb, and then leave the rest of the space, and when i come too install vista it will have to partitions, and one will be empty and ready to install vista?

how do drivers work? is it just like having to seperate pc's, so each os has it's own set of drivers? one in x64 one x86?

thanks
yanto.

yantorsen · 15 Oct 2007 at 20:49

if i wanted to keep my existing install of vista could i use Acronis Disk Director Suite 9 ?

valerian · 15 Oct 2007 at 21:12

yantorsen said:
I have got Vista home premium 64-bit, and it seems that all my older games like medieval 2 total war, and aoe3 are not compatible.

SO I want to dual boot with xp pro. thing is I have no idea how.

And is it possible to keep my exsisting vista install, or will i have to start from scratch?

how do drivers work over two os's?

Just want some general info on how to dual boot really, pros/cans etc...

Thanks
Yanto.

just buy another hard drive, and choose which to boot to when you start it up

yantorsen · 15 Oct 2007 at 22:02

valerian said:
just buy another hard drive, and choose which to boot to when you start it up

well i would, but I'm only doing it so that i can see if any of my existing hardware is faulty, because I can't get any games to run , but all my games are older, so i wasn't sure if it was vista x64 compatibility issues, or a hardware issue.

thanks, yanto.

mame · 15 Oct 2007 at 22:30

can easily be done on 1 HD. I have XP and Vista. You get a boot menu just before windows starts up. Makes no difference which order you install them in. I might be wrong but i dont think i actually did anything other than install an OS to each partition. As for the boot menu (not sure the proper name) you can set up which OS you want as default and how long the menu is displayed. My menu defaults to Vista but gives me 3 seconds to change to XP. So if i do do nothing, it loads Vista.

yantorsen · 15 Oct 2007 at 22:47

mame said:
can easily be done on 1 HD. I have XP and Vista. You get a boot menu just before windows starts up. Makes no difference which order you install them in. I might be wrong but i dont think i actually did anything other than install an OS to each partition. As for the boot menu (not sure the proper name) you can set up which OS you want as default and how long the menu is displayed. My menu defaults to Vista but gives me 3 seconds to change to XP. So if i do do nothing, it loads Vista.

right cheers for that.

is there anyway of doing it withut unistalling my existing vista install though?

it currently only has one partition.