Windows Vista Dual Boot with Two Drives

I had XP on my computer then put Vista on a new hard drive. I had the drive with Vista hooked up then I put the other drive with XP in. Both drives work and the Vista drive is C and the XP drive is F and G. Some of my programs won't work with Vista so is there a way to dual boot with two drives?

 

If you unhooked the XP drive then installed Vista it did not know to create a dual boot menu. You should be able to go into the bios and select which drive you want to boot first. Vista does not require itself to be the C: drive to boot but XP does. You may be able to put the dvd in and repair the boot while your in vista. I'm sure u can find this on the micro site cause I saw it the other day but never read it.

 

Zander did something like that, so if he reads this he'll be able to tell you how he does it.

I got a Loptop with MCE on it with two drives and installed Vista on the 2nd drive. Vista recognized XP on the first drive and created a boot loader. Works almost exactly like dual booting with 98 and XP - almost

You can try a 3rd party boot loader, the only one I know of for Vista installations is Vista Boot Pro http://www.vistabootpro.org/

Some considerations with dual booting:

Using the built in imaging of Vista (absent in Home), the imaging softare will image XP as well, no way around that.

Booting between the installations erases Vista's System Restore points.

Whether a 3rd party boot loader gets around those problems, I don't know yet.

Regards - Charles

 

I do the same thing wth my desktop. My bios has a bootloader menu, so if I push F8 when it is starting, it will display a menu with all of the installed drives so i can choose which one to boot from. I actually prefer this way to having a dual boot menu, since the majority of the time I want to just boot directly into Vista. Also, when (if) you want to get rid of XP, you don't have to deal with fixing the bootloader.

As for the drive letters - when in the XP, the XP drive will be C. When in Vista, the Vista drive will be C.

 

Yes, I did the same thing too. It's not a problem. As has been stated here, all that's necessary is to change the boot order in your bios. That's all. Vista will still be the c drive and will assign drive letters for the disk with XP on it. Theirs no need to swap cables or anything like that.

FWIW, Vista will always set it's drive up as the c drive. Regardless of where it's installed to. XP won't do this but it doesn't matter where you install XP to. Mines installed on my D drive and it runs just fine. The drive it's installed on is a logical partition, not a primary. All that's necessary with XP when it comes to the C drive is that you have one and that it is a primary partition. It needs it for it's boot files. If you install XP to a drive other than C, it'll still write the boot files to the C drive.

 

I have never used a boot loader so where can I look to see if Vista installed one? In my BIOS I have the Vista drive booting first then I have a DVD drive booting second. Since I still see the XP drive in windows explorer after Vista installs, can I disable the XP drive in my BIOS and only have Vista load without seeing XP and sometimes disable Vista and only see XP so I can dual boot that way? If I can disable the drives I will still be able to enable them again when I go back to the BIOS right?

 

When you boot from the VIsta drive, you would see the boot loader give you the option of which OS to load. Another way to tell is to go the Advanced System Properties->Startup and Recovery Options. There will be a combo box there with all of the OS's that Vista knows about. If there is more than one, then Vista will automatcally install a boot loader.

You can disable and re-enable your drives in your bios without any problems. I always leave both drives enabled and just use the bios to select which on to boot into. That way i can access all of my data from both drives on either OS.

 

Not in this instance. What we are talking about here is installing Vista with the XP drive disconnected. So, there is no XP in the menu. The menu isn't even displayed for that matter because Vista isn't aware of the OS on the other drive. So, you have to go into the bios and change the boot order to boot from one or the other.

 

Thanks for the help everyone. I tried it tonight and left both drives hooked up and just changed the boot order in the BIOS and I was able to use either OS and go back to the other without any problems. It works great that way.

 

I know...I was telling how to tell if he has a bootloader installed.