Windows Vista - Dual Boot?

Zascar

I was in a conference today and got a demo of Windows Vista form a guy in Microsoft. I actually really liked it and want to give it a go. I'd like to do a dual boot with XP & Vista, but I've never done this before so I'd appreciate some help.

I currently have a P4, 3.4, 1GB Ram with XP Home. It has 2 hard drives set up as follows: 1x250gb Sata, partitioned into two drives - Drive C: ( 50GB) + Drive (200gb). The second hard drive F: is 120gb IDE (kinda slow only use it for backup.

Ideally I'd install on as C: is nearly full and don't want to mess with XP. Can anyone tell me the best way to do this? If necessary I can get Partiton Magic etc and create a further partition if this makes things easier.

Has anyone done it already, it is easy enough to do?

Thanks

Zascar

Also, I went to download here: http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm and its says it is 3200MB - is that correct?

Ruu_Old

I wouldnt bother dual booting it until the final release comes out, dont see much point in it.

Gosh

Zascar wrote:

Also, I went to download here: http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm and its says it is 3200MB - is that correct?

Yeah ...

Zascar

Ruu wrote:

I wouldnt bother dual booting it until the final release comes out, dont see much point in it.

Well I don't have a system to dedicate it to and I want to try it out...

So anyone know how to do it?

Alun

VMWare or VirtualPC ?

astrofool

Vista uses a different bootmanager to XP, so you'll have to be careful. Last I used it however, if you chose a dual boot option, it reverted to the old style manager.

Zascar

So would it be best to get a another hard drive completly and just swap them around when you want to use it?

bk86a

No problem with dual boot. Vista installs it's own boot manager, little different than old one from XP, but it works just fine.
I had Windows XP installed on C: and Vista on No problem.

Mike

seamus

Windows Virtual Server and VMware are both free. Would you not be better off attempting to install Vista as a virtual machine than tinkering with your existing one?

bk86a

I've never seen Vista working on VM or VS fast enough to work on it with Aero turned on.

Mike

8T8

Picked up a little tip elsewhere if you want to restore XP as the default boot and remove the Vista boot manager run this from the Vista DVD;

\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force


I had a handy little trick for not needing the boot manager as Vista didn't detect my RAID controller which XP sits on so all I have to do is use the bios easy boot and select which HD to boot to go into which ever OS.

Zascar

Found this on another forum:
Dual booting here between Vista Beta 2 & XP - works fine. Simply set aside a partition of at least 12Gb, boot from the Vista DVD and target this partition for install. The installer will modify boot.ini and give you a boot menu choice of which OS to start.

Worth a try I'd say!

Archytas

Zascar wrote:

Found this on another forum:
Dual booting here between Vista Beta 2 & XP - works fine. Simply set aside a partition of at least 12Gb, boot from the Vista DVD and target this partition for install. The installer will modify boot.ini and give you a boot menu choice of which OS to start.

Worth a try I'd say!

My PC is happily booting between XP and Vista now... I had to change the bootloader around a bit though because it(the bootloader) doesn't recognise my usb keyboard so when I want to play with vista I just use the PS/2 keyboard I got still plugged in but on the floor... not ideal but gets me by.(Thers options to decide what drivers to load and where.. just havn't looked through it yet..) So I changed the default to be XP and the timeout to 5 secs. Loads of time to choose but short enough not to be annoying to wait on XP to boot.

Just like to point out my love for Windows Vista!!!!