2 Hard Drives with 2 OS Problem

Voltage

Voltage

Voltage

Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2006
Posts
3,647
Ok,

Ive got a WD Raptor with Vista Ultimate 64bit.

Now i have just bought a WD SATA II 250gb drive and want to install Windows XP Prof.

I have gone and installed Windows XP on the new drive however after it runs the format it resets then on reboot it says:-

Error loading operating system

then nothing happens....ive searched the forum but people with this problem are peeps partitioning one hard drive and i have two seperate disks.
 
Try vista boot pro (although you need to be in windows to load this up).

MS operating systems have always worked with different OSes but you must install the oldest on first otherwise you mess up the boot files.

From my 18 months experience with XP & Vista on the same PC I can tell you that even now it is still not perfected and you cannot have system restore on Vista as it will not work when XP is also installed on the same PC (XP will also need to be on the 1st bootable partition on the C drive).

This is because Vista cannot see its own system restore if XP is installed first so big own goal by MS but thats the way it is.

If Vista goes wrong as system restore is not working properly you will usually have to reinstall Vista to fix it!!

Good luck.
 
You could do as I have done.
I installed vista 64 about a month ago, then decided to install windows xp as I needed to use it for some software.
I have two hard drives, as you do. What I did was disable the drive with vista on and changed the boot order. Then i installed xp on my now first drive, which was the second.
After both operating systems are installed, all you have to do to boot into either os is just change the boot order of the hard drives, save and exit.
Long winded but works.
Two completely seperate operating systems.
 
New motherboards have built in boot options, on my Asus press F8 and you can choose which to boot from. Saves messing around with boot loaders, grub/windows etc. useful if I need to reformat the drive with the main boot loader. I couldn't get a triple boot system to work (Xp/vista/ubuntu) with the grub loader but with the bios selector dead easy.
 
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