Dual Boot Question

[spinemangler]

Quick question for the Vista Pros here. I recently purchased Vista Ultimate.

I had a hard drive in my PC with Windows XP installed. I decided to pull that drive and set it aside in case Vista went horribly wrong during install.

I added another formatted blank hard drive to my PC and installed Vista without incident. It was quite pleasant actually.

My question is: Is there a way to add the XP drive back to the PC and dual boot between these 2 drives? Or is it something that Vista needed to know about during install?

I am really enjoying Vista, I just need to go back to my XP install for a few of my games, and the drivers for my video card aren't all that mature (x1950XT)

If anyone has some pointers for doing this that would help, that would be awesome, its kinda a pain to physically swap these sata plugs each time I want to switch my OS.

Anyway, thanks in advance for the help.
-Spine

 

[Feanor1]

I did pretty much the same thing just left both XP and Vista drives in. I am dual booting from the BBS menu at startup. Not sure if your motherboard supports that function.

 

[spinemangler]

Yeah, I was actually doing that myself for a few days, but wanted a more complete setup.

I found this sticky on another forum that walked me through the exact steps to do this.
http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=84455

Essentially what you end up doing is installing the Vista boot manager onto the XP drive. By default it will see the Vista drive, and by adding a new windows "legacy" drive, it will add the XP drive. (Make sure your XP drive is set as the first bootable hard drive in your BIOS). I can now dual boot flawlessly.

 

[airblazer]

Another way is by partitioning a hard drive and installing XP to one of the partitions.
Then install Vista.
You then get an option to select OS you want at bootup.
Neat and very handy for those games not supported with vista.

 

[spinemangler]

Airblazer,
That is the same result that I have. I just have it on seperate drives instead of partitions. On boot I get vistas boot manager asking "Windows Vista Ultimate" or "Windows XP Pro".

The idea was I didnt want to reinstall either OS, and I have gotten your result without reinstalling anything.

Check out the link I posted, it might clear it up for you.

-Spine

 

[shandro]

i recently got vista ultimate and installed it. after finding some things wont run i decided to install XP Home, but didnt take out vista drive. after XP installed Vista drive will not load Vista. Any help would really help!

 

[warawara]

Spinemangler

Thanks for this post, saved me a couple hours of frustration, taking wife out to dinner, so in a round about way, she thanks you to.

(😵)

Cheers!

Wara