Dual Boot a good idea?

Swi1ch

Swi1ch

Swi1ch

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19 Nov 2008
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With my new machine i'm also going up to Windows Vista. I've realised however, that some things arn't going to run on that (Deux Ex, Thief and Commandos for example)

Therefore i'm considering dual booting the 1TB HDD I will be buying (Or a separate, smaller harddrive).

What I want to know is firstly how hard this is to accomplish, then say I have Windows XP and Vista on a smaller harddrive plus some games in separate partitions, and then the rest of my stuff on a second harddrive, can I access all of the stuff regardless of whether I boot XP or Vista?
 
I have a dual boot set up on my machine, got 2 x 320gb drives, one with XP64 and another with Vista 64.

Setting up the dual boot is easy. Connect both the hard drives up and install Vista, when installing Vista remember to install to the new drive or partition and it should set it up for you automatically. Once Vista is installed, when you boot up your machine you will get a boot menu of Vista and XP (will say older operating system).

You can access your XP files from the Vista drive and vice-versa and should be able to access any other drives or partitions you have set up.

Hope this helps.
 
if u have 2 hard drives when installing dont have both hard drives connected....connect 1 hd then install the os...then dc that hd and connect the other....install other os.
this way u can choose from bios options which to boot from.

best way ^^^ as it wont pause for x amount of seconds to ask u each and every time which os u want to boot too.

if u want to install both os to the same hard drive then install xp (first)on the first partition and then install vista on a different partition.
 
The programs you mention should run in compatability mode anyway, but I still recommend that you dual boot. It's easy enough to do, as already mentioned, install XP on one partition/hard drive, then install Vista onto another. You can use EasyBCD (download it here: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) which is a useful program for customising the Vista boot manager, enabling you to lower the countdown timer and make the names decent rather than "Earlier Version of Windows."
 
memory said:
if u have 2 hard drives when installing dont have both hard drives connected....connect 1 hd then install the os...then dc that hd and connect the other....install other os.
this way u can choose from bios options which to boot from.

best way ^^^ as it wont pause for x amount of seconds to ask u each and every time which os u want to boot too.
Click to expand...

My preferred method. It's nice to have XP as a backup, but I rarely use it now.
 
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