Vista and XP common files and drives

[ash_scotland88]

Is it possible to dual boot Vista and XP and have them share a hard-drive partition as well as saving files from both?

eg, if i install software on XP it'll automatically (or with an option, eg "save to z drive") install on vista,
if i save somehting into my documents it'll save to both of them, emails when checked will appear in both inboxes
media files can be accessed via both
etc

so yeah is the above possible and how would i go about doing it?

 

[lord filbuster]

AFAIK you can't install two versions of windows on the same partition, and vista has my documents in a different folder to XP so thats no to saving in both im afraid. Media files can of course be accessed by both, as long as you don't store them in a protected folder. I dual boot vista and xp, and if i install something on one, it can usually be run on the other without a second install, some programs don't like it though. I don't know about the email thing, but it may be possible.

 

[LeperousDust]

Essentially its all about the application data and registry when it comes to sharing programs. If you can keep these in sync then its mostly possible.

You can share common system files from XP and Vista that's impossible, although it would be cool that way to save space.

Basically Vista and XP with their own partitions and installs, a third for programs common to both and fourth "home" partition can have my documents my music, etc... all pointed towards it from both OS installs. The third and fourth could essentially be just one but for completeness i'd keep em separate.

Then its a matter of keeping application data from relevant programs syncs between the to %appdata% folders of the two OS's.

It shouldn't be too difficult, getting all the apps to play fair may be a minor headache though.

 

[ash_scotland88]

cheers
don't quite follow the %appdata% thing but i noticed if install something on my 2nd hard-drive theres allways some aspect that appears on the C drive, which iam guessing will confuse things.

I still don't know how much I'll be using vista since I totally hated it due to its random crahsing of programmes, blue screen restarts, but i know when I get a decent graphics card I would want dx10 so at the moment thats the only Vista only thing I can think of at the moment.

I just want the option to be able to access all/most of my data between the OSs