Dual booting

Y

yfel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 2, 2008
Messages
130
I'm building my new system today (hooray) and I'm putting vista on it. Is it possible to keep my old hdd with xp on it and switch between the two os's upon reboot? I've never done any kind of dual boot stuff, I was worried if I had xp on one and vista on the other and both hooked up at the same time I'd have issues.
 
Main problem is that your XP install might not be stable. In my experience, rarely does an existing XP install work correctly when moved from an old PC to a new PC. If this was a fresh install of XP on the new hardware, then yeah, you can dual boot Vista and XP.
 
Fire up XP. Pop your Vista install disk in the drive and choose to install Vista. Select 'Custom install' and choose an available drive or partition to place the installation on. Follow the prompts till you complete the installation.

That'll get Vista on your machine and have your dual-boot menu already created for you. Microsoft OS installation do that automatically, when another installation is present. You only need to install in the order of "oldest version first, newest version last."

Got it? Here's the 'for dummies' version:

  • Install XP
  • Install Vista to a different drive or partition
  • Bingo! Multiboot!
 
Ah nice, so I can install them both on the same drive with xp on like 100g partition? That'd be perfect since the old drive is ide and I didn't really want that cable in there.
 
Yes, as long as they have separate partitions they can be on the same drive. Unless you have any programs which require XP, though (and there are few now, and then only really specialist packages) then you'll probably find you rarely use the XP install if you make Vista your primary OS. Having to shut down and boot a different OS is somewhat of a deterrent to using the other OS if it doesn't offer that much that's different.
 
This will be the first time I'm playing around in Vista so I don't really know what to expect. I guess XP is my comfort blanket.. I'll see how it works out. Thanks
 
I initially installed Vista as a dual-boot with XP (and still have the XP install on the machine I initially used Vista on.)

Haven't had need to boot into XP for so long I just forget the XP install is even there most of the time. Had Vista configured as primary boot OS within a week or two of installing it, and haven't looked back. :)
 
yfel said:
This will be the first time I'm playing around in Vista so I don't really know what to expect.
Click to expand...
Vista is going on two years in terms of being available to the public, so at this point, you should know exactly what to expect. Take your second drive, and install Vista on it. You'll have thirty days before you need to enter a key and activate it. Chances are, you'll soon discover that Vista is just fine, and if you still need to snuggle with your XP blanket, load it up in a VM.
 
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