Dual boot

Kennysevenfold

Kennysevenfold

Kennysevenfold

Soldato
Joined
9 Sep 2008
Posts
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Location
Glasgow
Had my 320gig sammy F1 with vista now for 3/4months

got another one delivered this morning and installed xp pro in it

now whenever i start up my pc, vista loads as default, how do i set to to choose which os to load just after post.?

and in the "startup and recovery" section on my vista drive it does not have the option to set the "delay time" and "earlier version of windows"

Any help much appreciated guys :)
 
Bit strange, that is not how it should have happened. What precisely did you do?

If you install XP after vista, the most likely thing to happen is that XP will ruin vista's bootloader. From this point on, you will boot XP every time and vista will never be on the boot screen.

If you install XP, then vista afterwards, you'll be fine as vista can cope with XP previously existing.

Note that XP is funny about where you can install it. It is best to give it a primary partition right at the start of the drive, which is probably where you put vista in the first place. Did you by any chance install XP in a partition that was not at the start of the drive?
 
basically what i tried now,

only had the xp drive installed and formatted and installed xp on the whole single drive (320gig)

then

hooked up the other drive (same 320gig) and installed vista.

vista loads up now when i turn on my pc, i either want to be able to choose at start up or have xp load by default.

:(:(:(
 
Oh. Two desperate drives, I missed that. Your options are more limited then. I'd set the XP drive to be the default boot drive in the bios, and hit F8 (or whatever it is on your board) to choose to boot from the other drive when you wish to.

The alternative is to work out how to configure vista's bootloader to do this (which I'm not going anywhere near), or give up on microsoft attempts at bootloading and install grub.

The line
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

in the menu.lst configuration file will most likely load XP, using XP's own bootloader (thats the chainloader part)

and
title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Will most likely load vista. You may need to play with the (hda,b) bit, it's hard drive a, partition b to get it to load the right drive.
Grub is generally a linux thing, but grub4dos will do the above without needing a linux install.

Good luck :)
 
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