[GUIDE] Dual-Boot Vista on Separate Hard Drive WITHOUT Touching your XP Installation

sluzbenik

Limp Gawd
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Aug 9, 2006
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I installed Vista on a entirely separate hard drive because I did not want the Vista bootloader on my XP drive, or any mingling of the OSes at all. To remind everyone, to do this right, you must have already installed Vista with your Vista drive as your system drive - that is, you installed Vista with your BIOS boot order and bootable device set so the Vista drive is FIRST. If you haven't done this, as you probably know, Vista has already installed its bootloader files on your XP drive, and you will have a heck of a time changing back (fixing the bootloader is easy, but you can't easily remove the hidden "boot" folder or "bootmgr" program - they are protected, even in XP and DOS mode.) It is possible to recover from this situation, but that's another topic. (Here's one hint: if you install Vista, the fail-safe thing to do without touching the BIOS is to simply physically unplug all your other hard drives.)

Fine, but switching the boot order in BIOS (I can just hit F8 to get a list of devices to boot from but I miss it all the time) is annoying. Here's how to get your XP to boot from your Vista drive, insuring no Vista files and no bootloader are on your XP disk.

1) In BIOS, set your Vista drive as the boot drive. You should also have a list of bootable drives in BIOS under your boot menu that is not the boot order. This screen determines which hard drives will appear in the actual boot order settings (on my mobo, you have a maximum of 4 bootable hard drives, so this lets you choose) and I believe, assigns the "pre-OS" disk numbers that you will use later. If you can, make your XP drive the second device in this screen but this isn't totally necessary. After you've followed the rest of my steps you'll never have to enter the BIOS again to change the boot drive.
2) Get VistaBootPro and install it on your Vista system.
2) Copy these files from the root of XP drive to the root of your Vista drive: ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini. Open Properties for boot.ini, and uncheck the "read only" box. We will be editing this later.
3) In Vista, right-mouse "My Computer," select "Manage" and then double-click "Storage" and then Disk Management. You will now see your disks. We need the numbers attached to them. Note your Vista boot drive will always be "disk 0." Make a mental note of the disk number of your XP drive. If you have correctly set XP in BIOS to be the second possible boot drive, it should be displayed as "Disk 1".
4) Open the boot.ini in the Vista root, and change rdisk(0) to rdisk(1), or whatever number your XP drive was in Disk Management. You should not have to change the partition, since your boot partition is already set correctly. Mine looks like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT /TUTAG=FNUBFR /KERNEL=TUKERNEL.EXE
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (TuneUp Backup)" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT /TUTAG=FNUBFR-BAK

Yours may not have a timeout option. I would include this line to help you troubleshoot (or easily enter safe mode), and I have my boot.ini like this because on my XP system I use a desktop mod (TuneUp Styler) which lets me boot into a backup of the desktop in case of a problem with icons or the graphics mods it makes.

5) Start VistaBootPro and click "Manage OS Entries." Click "Add New Operating System." Change OS Type to "Windows Legacy" and "OS Name" to "Windows XP" or whatever you want to call it, ie., "Junky Old XP." Change drive letter to C:, this makes sure that C: will be assigned to your XP drive. Adjust the timeout to whatever you want, Vista will automatically boot once the timeout is up. Click "Apply."

6) Reboot! You will get the Vista bootloader, when you select Windows XP, XP will boot right up. Now you don't have to screw with the Vista bootloader, and you won't have Vista files on your XP drive.

The key here is the disk number in boot.ini, which tells XP which drive to boot from. After you make these changes, I believe if you screw with your BIOS drive order, it will no longer work correctly, since your drives will be assigned new disk numbers. Let me know if this works for you, I'll try to help you if I can. If you are using Linux, or some other bootloader program don't ask me, I can't help you. These instructions are for vanilla XP/Vista systems.

This makes Vista your default OS. There is no way to make XP your default OS because as far as I know you can not use the XP bootloader and boot.ini to start Vista. If anyone knows anything different, let me know...
 
No offense, but I think it's ridiculous when people say "I don't want the Vista bootloader to touch my system" or any comments like it, but then they go and use some third party bootloader like VistaBootPro and trust it with their systems. Pretty sure the Vista bootloader is the best possible one you're going to find presently for Vista, bar none.

I wouldn't trust third party bootloaders if you paid me: VistaBootPro, GRUB, LILO, etc, no way in hell.

That procedure you just mentioned is awfully complicated, frought with possible things that could pooch an entire system, installing Vista more than is necessary, and other haphazard things that I would never recommend.

Install XP, install Vista, you're done. How tough is that?

If anyone finds the "guide" useful, more power to 'em, I guess. I'm just saying it seems a bit of long path to do something that is pretty simple to do in the first place. The "I don't want the Vista bootloader to touch my system" comes across as paranoia to many people, and that's not a good thing to spread around right now with Vista being just launched.

As always, YMMV, and these are my opinions and mine alone.
 
No offense, but I think it's ridiculous when people say "I don't want the Vista bootloader to touch my system" or any comments like it, but then they go and use some third party bootloader like VistaBootPro and trust it with their systems.
That's like saying you don't want a cold, so you're going to get pneumonia instead.
Install XP, install Vista, you're done. How tough is that?
I'm absolutely blown away at the number of dual boot threads. Not the fact that people want to dual boot, but the fact that so many are having trouble with it. Nothing's changed since the days of dual booting 98 and NT.
I haven't tried dual booting Vista with anything yet, but I haven't seen anything state that it's any different.
 
I haven't tried dual booting Vista with anything yet, but I haven't seen anything state that it's any different.

Well, I have and I assure you, it is no different. I too have difficulty understanding what all the fuss is about. Like bbz_Ghost said, install xp, then vista, then...... your done.
 
I'll throw a little monkey wrench in things. I installed Vista. Now I want to install xp and have vista boot loader handle both. If I install xp on a 2nd drive, then reinstall vista over itself, will that work? I'd prefer not to have to reinstall all my apps under vista.
 
I'll throw a little monkey wrench in things. I installed Vista. Now I want to install xp and have vista boot loader handle both. If I install xp on a 2nd drive, then reinstall vista over itself, will that work? I'd prefer not to have to reinstall all my apps under vista.


Easy answer, it's not the best way but this works.

Install XP to the other seperate (from Vista) drive....now make sure that drive is set as the boot drive initially so you can boot to XP...then once in XP, run the Vista DVD and do an "advanced" install option, choose the Vista drive, and let it do it's thing. When it finds the Vista info, it will ask you if you want to do a "repair" or fresh install, just do a repair install, and after that finishes you will just have to re-apply all updates to Vista that were done after the initial install.

By doing this the Vista install will set up the bootloader again and let you choose between XP and Vista. Other than that I have not tried to "fix" the Vista bootloader.
 
There's a neat little command line utility called bootcfg... might do you well to research it and learn how to use it properly. <hint, hint>
 
Here's what I did:

Install vista on second drive.

Done.


Seriously, that's it. It installed a boot loader and let me choose between XP and Vista. I didn't have to do a single step more than that.
 
Well, first it's not that complicated a procedure. Second, VistaBootPro isn't a bootloader, it's just a GUI for the bcedit command line program in Windows. It doesn't install its own bootloader, it's just an easy editor.

Whatever people like is fine...This way you can always boot into XP by changing the BIOS boot order again for one thing. And it just insures totally separate systems. I prefer it this way, that's all...
 
That's the same thing i did. I'm at a point where i just don't care. If Vista wants to molest my XP drive it can go right ahead.


Same here, while I am keeping my dual boot for the time being, I have hardly touched XP since I got the 100.59 driver and my official retail copy of Vista. I have what I needed backed up...soon XP will be moved to a different rig entirely.
 
No offense, but I think it's ridiculous when people say "I don't want the Vista bootloader to touch my system" or any comments like it, but then they go and use some third party bootloader like VistaBootPro and trust it with their systems. Pretty sure the Vista bootloader is the best possible one you're going to find presently for Vista, bar none.

I wouldn't trust third party bootloaders if you paid me: VistaBootPro, GRUB, LILO, etc, no way in hell..
You mis understand what he did. Vistaboot pro is not a 3rd party boot loader. Its a GUI interface for EDITING the vista boot loader. Big difference there. If you look at bcdedit's command line options its enormous and complex, a gui like easybcd or vistabootpro simply makes it easier.

Vista's boot loader simply CALLS the ntloader from xp to boot the system. Copying the ntloader files over is just part of the process of dual booting while having both volumes as drive c:\ (while booted into that particular os.. it won't be drive c: when booted with the other) and without risking somehow misreading those device0 device1 things from the vista setup program and goofing something up.
 
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