Laptop With Vista - need to create Dual Boot xp/vista system

father_ted9t9

Hi Everyone, I Just recently bought an acer 6920 Laptop with Vista home installed. I Need to create a dual boot system as the software which i use most on it is for Win XP Only There is a 320 gig internal drive and i have used vistas disk manager to shrink my primary drive and there is a 150 logical drive now there empty, but to dual install i need to have 2 primary partitions!! I Cant seem to do it, and partition magic 8 does not correctly run with vista...AAAArrrrggggghhh Help!!

Basically i need a solution so i can have vista and xp running from a dual bootloader at startup. Ive tried suggestions on most forums but just cant get to work!!


Thanks

FT9t9

meowCat

Hiya,

partitioning can be a bit tricky.
And I'm sorry I cannot offer a solution for you actual quation. But have you tried to run your program in compatibilty mode. I'm not sure Vista Home edition does that too, but I have Vista Enterprise and it works there, have a few xp programs running.

Good luck,
mC.

Capt'n Midnight

Look at an XP virtual machine

rahim

I'm in the same boat, been trying for a while.
I found this tutorial
Here
but it assumes that you have the Vista DVD, which I don't (OEM installation on laptop when I bought it) to restore the Vista MBR and fix it to boot both Vista and XP.

Might help, might not.

Edit: Also if anyone has any suggestions I'd appreciate it too.

father_ted9t9

rahim wrote: »

I'm in the same boat, been trying for a while.
I found this tutorial
Here
but it assumes that you have the Vista DVD, which I don't (OEM installation on laptop when I bought it) to restore the Vista MBR and fix it to boot both Vista and XP.

Might help, might not.

Edit: Also if anyone has any suggestions I'd appreciate it too.

Thanks for that, but i dont have vista dvd either Any other suggestions, come on you tecchie geniuses, you have to have come across this somewhere pleeeeease!!!

Thanks

FT9t9

I don't think you have to have two primary partitions to dual boot. Usually it would just copy the boot files on to the active primary partition, once NTLDR gets going it can then use the logical drives. I know I've done dual boots in the past with logical drives as I never use more than one primary partition - old Windows 9x limitations have stuck with me!

If you install XP it will probably overwrite the boot sector rendering Vista unbootable but download EasyBCD to your XP setup and that will allow you to rewrite the Vista MBR back.

rahim

Karsini wrote: »

I don't think you have to have two primary partitions to dual boot. Usually it would just copy the boot files on to the active primary partition, once NTLDR gets going it can then use the logical drives. I know I've done dual boots in the past with logical drives as I never use more than one primary partition - old Windows 9x limitations have stuck with me!

If you install XP it will probably overwrite the boot sector rendering Vista unbootable but download EasyBCD to your XP setup and that will allow you to rewrite the Vista MBR back.

To re-write the Vista MBR do you need to restore it first from the DVD or will EasyBCD sort all that out?

father_ted9t9

I Dont think you understand, when i put xp disk in cd drive and it starts setup, it then says it cannot see any harddrive to install to. This is what i need to sort out.

Thanks

FT9t9

Karsini wrote: »

I don't think you have to have two primary partitions to dual boot. Usually it would just copy the boot files on to the active primary partition, once NTLDR gets going it can then use the logical drives. I know I've done dual boots in the past with logical drives as I never use more than one primary partition - old Windows 9x limitations have stuck with me!

If you install XP it will probably overwrite the boot sector rendering Vista unbootable but download EasyBCD to your XP setup and that will allow you to rewrite the Vista MBR back.

rahim

rahim wrote: »

To re-write the Vista MBR do you need to restore it first from the DVD or will EasyBCD sort all that out?

I'm pretty sure it can modify the boot sector or MBR without having a previous copy. BootPart can do it that way as well but only works on FAT32.

father_ted9t9 wrote: »

I Dont think you understand, when i put xp disk in cd drive and it starts setup, it then says it cannot see any harddrive to install to. This is what i need to sort out.

Thanks

FT9t9

Ah, well in this case you'll need storage drivers, most likely Intel's AHCI drivers. They can be installed with a USB floppy drive if you have one, I can tell you what you need to do if need be.

Goldigga

Father Ted

Im having the same problem. I reated the partition ok, but when I load the XP installation CD, it tells me me it cannot detect a the hard drive!!! Its driving me mad!!

rrpc

I know you can do this very simply if you have XP installed first. You can also do it with multiple XP installations but I've never tried it with Vista on first.

The XP on first setup works like this: (you can try it the other way around if you like - but as I say I've never done it)

You have a partition with free space, start the laptop with the Vista DVD in and boot from it, choose the partition you want to install to and the setup runs fine. When you reboot you get a boot menu with Vista and 'previous version of Windows' (or something like that). That will be the XP partition.

You can do the same thing in reverse with Vista installed first, but you'll need to reinstall the Vista bootloader because the XP one is not compatable.

Here's a description of what you need to do. It also tells you what to do if you don't have a Vista DVD.

rrpc

Goldigga wrote: »

Father Ted

Im having the same problem. I reated the partition ok, but when I load the XP installation CD, it tells me me it cannot detect a the hard drive!!! Its driving me mad!!

This happens with SATA drives. Basically the drivers for them are not native to the XP installer and so you will get BSOD unmountable boot device errors.

There's two ways of doing this. The first is to get a floppy disk with the SATA drivers on it. These are not the Windows drivers, but the ones that you install when the message "Press F6 to install..." appears at the bottom of the screen at the very start of the XP install process.

You can sometimes get these from the drivers disk for your machine and there's (usually) a menuitem to create the disk. It's only one floppy with very little on it (four files usually) with an oeminfo.inf file included. You just put that in your drive when windows setup prompts.

The other way is to slipstream your windows XP SP2 cd using Ryan VM's integrator. Since sometime last year, I've never had to F6 install SATA drivers during XP installation, so I presume the drivers have now been integrated into the PE.

Oooh look.. my sixteen hundredth post