Dual Booting w/ Vista and XP

[blazemonkey]

hello all, i'm going to be tossing vista on a spare 80gb drive in my gaming rig and dual booting with xp. i plan to use it for a few weeks as my main os and compare gaming performance in my games to see if the extra features are worth it. i just recently installed a fresh copy of xp sp3 on my system and for some crazy reason windows decided to remap all my drive letters. it ended up being a pain in the ass to fix, but now i have everything installed just right and i'd like to move on. i'd like to use windows xp's boot loader so when i decide to unplug the vista disk it will be like it wasn't even there. i don't want to have to start changing drive letters and reinstalling boot loaders. lol

 

[milkweg]

Newer motherboards have an option to boot from any boot-able device by pressing a function key (usually F8 or F11). Simply disconnect your already installed XP HDD and install Vista to the 80GB HDD. After that is all done you can reconnect the XP HDD and simply press the function key to boot to OS HDD of choice. By default it will boot to the HDD you have set it to boot to in the bios so only need to press the function key when wanting to boot to the other HDD. This will keep each OS mbr intact from each other.

 

[blazemonkey]

ok, that was a dumb question. lol.. i was thinking the exact same thing right after i made this thread bios boot menu it will be

 

[heatlesssun]

I you can please, report your experience. I started gaming almost exclusively in Vista about a year ago and haven’t looked back much. There are some older titles that I have such as the Atari 80 classics that do not work in Vista (and I really like those old school games) but I have dedicated XP boxes for stuff like that. New titles, and I have most through last year like Crysis, CoD4, Gears of War, STALKER, UT3, Timshift, etc, have worked very well in Vista x86. I’ve just built my first dedicated Vista x64 box and so far things are looking pretty good on the gaming and software side (I’m still tweaking the overclocking).

I’m a huge Vista fan boy for the consumer. It’s a fantastic OS in the right hands. Unfortunately many wrong hands have touched it, including Microsoft!