Duel booting help

Dicehunter

Dicehunter

Dicehunter

Soldato
Joined
19 Feb 2007
Posts
15,362
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Northampton
I have xp pro installed and vista ultimate installed on seperate hard drives now when i turn on my machine it boots to vista, How can i stop this and pick at bootup from a list of either xp or vista, thanks in advance :)
 
Well dual booting normally in my use is 1 HDD with partition but if you do not see option to choose the OS at last part of bios before boot up, then press F8 and on all new mobos this lets you pick the BOOT DEVICE before it goes to the SAFE Mode Screen (on new mobos you need press F8 again after choice to get to SAFE MODE menu.
So basically reboot PC, keep tapping F8, you see BOOT Option MENU, choose the HDD with the OS you want, then hit ENTER/RETURN.
 
It not in the OS at that point so would need be some kinda DOS app loaded into memory so doubt it, does it not stay at your last choice until you change it again ?.
I know if you do a real dual boot from 1 HD with partitions, you simply edit the boot.ini to tell it what OS to use as default.
 
Well it boots to vista but if i want to boot to xp from the other hdd then i have to press up and enter very quickly when its booting
 
helmutcheese is bang on the money.

With your generic dual-booting on one HDD, you just use something like grub or lilo that lets you choose which you want to boot up, but that's already considered as software on an OS-level. You want something on a BIOS level.d

If you wanted to boot from XP defaultly, and to Vista when you decide to, set the XP HDD as the default. That's all you can do that I can think of.
 
I think you can do what you want with this http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Not tried it myself yet - have been resisting any urge to try vista - mainly because it doesn't appear to offer me anything more than the known quantity that is XP and work are showing zero interest in vista (so there's no catalyst to skill up in it for them either).
 
Had the same prob when I dual booted too.
do this:
Download and install EasyBCD.

Launch the app and go to Add/Remove Entries.

Under “Add an Entry” and under the Windows tab and select in the Version drop-down list “Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3”.

Change the Drive to E:\ and the name to “Windows XP”, then click “Add Entry” and “Save”.

Vista & XP - EasyBCD



Reboot the system and you’ll have two entries in the Vista bootloader, and can boot into either operating system.


check this http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp
 
Was going to suggest VistaBootPRO, but EasyBCD seems much better.

Had to shuffle my OS installations around & it was quite a messy job. Got it working in the end but XP, & never thought I'd be saying this so soon, is now gone! Happily using Vista only :cool:
 
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