2 Hdd For Vista & XP

@home · 13 Apr 2008 at 12:58

I have 2 separate internal SATA drives & I am trying to put Vista on 1 & XP on the other. I installed XP & got it all up & running but then when I install Vista on the other Hdd & boot up, only Vista is given as a boot up option.

I am aware of the dual booting on 1 Hdd & installing XP first but this is 2 Separate drives.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening & how to get both XP & Vista to be a boot up option.

Hope I have explained correctly

Cheers

ChrisD. · 13 Apr 2008 at 13:04

You have to change the drive boot order in the BIOS and put it to which drive you want to boot from. There may be a way round this, I'm sure someone will confirm if there is.

AbsenceJam · 13 Apr 2008 at 14:14

You should also be able to hit a key on startup to get a boot menu. A better solution would be to use a boot manager which you install on the drive, boot from and you get the option of what to start. There are loads of these.

@home · 13 Apr 2008 at 14:18

I have been in the bios & I have the usual option of booting from Floppy, CD, Hdd Etc Is that what you mean?

I also pressed f12 which took me in to the boot menu to choose which drive to boot from but it made no difference which one I chose it always boots from the last installed OS.

Cheers

Borden · 13 Apr 2008 at 17:50

Boot into vista and download and install a program called EasyBCD. This will then allow you to configure the vista bootloader. You can use it to add an entry very easily. All you have to do is click on the Add/Remove entries tab, give it a name and select which drive XP is on. Next time you boot you will be given the option of which OS to boot from.

You can also use this tool to change the default OS and the bootloader timeout before it boots into the default OS. Very handy tool.

ih8modem · 13 Apr 2008 at 18:24

strange

I installed Vista home premium just a few days ago, and it now gives me two option on bootup,

1 - older version of windows
2 - Windows Vista

I just checked my boot.ini file (which would have been the file for XP). It says to use a file called bcdedit.exe , which I have found in my c:\windows\system32\bcdedit.exe folder.

Change to the system dir, then trun bcdedit.exe /? for full options (I suggest running a cmd.exe window first)