XP & Vista dual boot?

Joebob

Joebob

Joebob

Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2005
Posts
5,909
Location
Burbage, Hinckley
I installed Vista today and then XP long side it. The problme is it only boots straight to XP with no option to go into Vista, yet on the hard drive both OS are there in seperate folders!!!

Anyone know why this might be?
 
Ok, Thanks.

Is it worth doing yet though ro do you think I would be better to wait until Vista has been out longer and has more driver support etc?
 
You've bought Vista but now you're asking us whether you should install it? :) Have a read of Vista threads in this forum to help you decide.
 
Right. Insert XP CD first and partition the hard drive into 2. Install XP on one partition and then when that is finished insert the Vista DVD on boot and install it on the other partition. It is all straight forward mate. You will then get the chance on bootup to choose XP or Vista to boot into. Any problems ask on here. All the best.
 
Start again, install XP first, and mak a partion, split the disk 50/50 then once XP is installed, install Vista.

Vista will install a boot loader, where you can pick to either run XP or VIsta.
 
dirtydog said:
You've bought Vista but now you're asking us whether you should install it? :) Have a read of Vista threads in this forum to help you decide.
Click to expand...
Nah, I don't buy any of my software... don't worry it's not pirate either. My work is a Microsoft Partner and we get stacks of software sent to us upon release. I've had a Beta copy of Vista sitting around for ages and just thought I would give it a go to see what it looks like etc. No doubt MS will be sending me the full version next Tuesday so I was wondering wether it's actually worth switching from Xp, I don't really want to format my drive as it's a laptop so it's only got 100Gb drive!
 
Joebob said:
I installed Vista today and then XP long side it. The problme is it only boots straight to XP with no option to go into Vista, yet on the hard drive both OS are there in seperate folders!!!

Anyone know why this might be?
Click to expand...

Vista uses a new booting configuration, if you install xp first, then vista, you'd be preseneted with the option of booting to a previous version of windows at the time of startup. Because you've installed XP on top (on a new partition I hope?) you'over overwritten the bootsector with a bootsector that is not compatible with Vista, therefore you need to load the following

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

and re-write the bootsector again to the Vista compatible BCD.

Hope that helps ;)
 
What if you install Vista on a totally different HD? Is this possible? I was thinking of getting a cheap SATA drive and putting Vista on it rather than faffing about with partitions and eating up valuable space. Still want to keep XP on my 74GB Raptor for the moment, as nowhere near confident that Vista will give me trouble free computing, so I want trusty XP to fall back on! Shouldn't be any problem doing this should there?

:confused:
 
TC1 said:
Right. Insert XP CD first and partition the hard drive into 2. Install XP on one partition and then when that is finished insert the Vista DVD on boot and install it on the other partition. It is all straight forward mate. You will then get the chance on bootup to choose XP or Vista to boot into. Any problems ask on here. All the best.
Click to expand...

So adding a OEM Vista ultimate disk after installing XP would work?
 
I have XP installed on a single raptor drive, and have recently installed Vista on to my RAID 0 raptor drives. I choose which drive to boot from when the PC boots, just press F8 during POST and it gives you the choice to select what drive to boot from. No different to using a boot manager and it means you can install any OS in any order.

Makes it simple if you decide to remove an OS, you don't need to modify any boot files.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom