Windows Vista Dual Boot [Vista] - using seperate Hard Drives

Thanks Pete.

B

 

does dual boot work if install vista into an external usb hdd? running out of space in my cpu hdd..

 

my guess is it's bootable...let mi get tis rite..so in theory, i plug in my usb hdd to boot vista and tat as my system drive. will dual boot still be an option? and any changes to my system when the OS is vista will only affect my external hdd rite?

sorry for the questions, cos the cpu is not used only by me so i gotta be sure..

 

If you connect the USB hard drive and change the bios to make this the first hard drive in the bios boot order, then Vista will install to it without making any changes to XP on the other drive. To boot XP again change the bios back. There will be no boot menu and no dualboot system installed and you will have to change the bios order every time you want to change which OS you want to boot.

If you leave the internal hard drive as first in the bios and install Vista to the USB drive then the XP install will be modified to accommodate the dualboot setup. The Vista boot system will be installed inside XP and the PBR (partition boot record) of the XP partition will be altered to boot the Vista boot system, instead of booting XP directly. The MBR (master boot record) of the internal hard drive will also be updated with the Vista MBR.
If you install this way and later change the USB drive to first boot hard drive then it will not boot as the Vista boot system won’t be on this drive, but on the internal hard drive.

I’ve never tested this on an external USB drive so can’t guarantee that there won’t be issues with Vista. The above scenarios are what happens with internal hard drives and they are usually the same with USB drives, but Vista is beta software and of course completely new so may operate differently. I would advise that you disconnect the internal hard drive while carrying out the install of Vista.

 

Just a couple of things on this general subject.

If you have a SATA drive and disable it in the bios so you can install Vista on another drive the SATA drive isn't necessarily disabled. I've found that it can be accessed and files changed with it is disabled in the bios. (I'm running an Albatron motherboard.) It might do better to open the computer up and disconnect the cables to the drive. You might have to do this every time you boot up Vista, assuming you want to fully separate the two system installs. I haven't experimented with a PATA drive as the boot XP drive in this regard.

Vista does boot differently than XP and does write some hidden files on the XP boot hard drive. Go to DOS do a "cd \ ", then key "dir /as" and/or "dir /ah" to show SYSTEM files and HIDDEN files. Most of the new files are in the directory "boot ". ALso, on the Vista install you can run the Vista boot edit program from (Vista) drive:windows\system32. The program is BCDEDIT.EXE. You can do a /? when you run it to see what the capabilities are. I backed up my entire XP boot drive when I installed Vista on a separate drive, then restored the XP drive back to original. I couldn't then boot into Vista because all the boot stuff was put on the XP drive and wiped out when I restored XP. Setting the Vista drive as the boot drive didn't work because of that. More experiments are under way. Great fun.

Some BCDEDIT.exe info:

More on the edit here.


and more here.

giles

 

i've foolishly mounted the image of vista using daemon tools and installed to my usb hdd, only to realise that i can't continue the installation when it's asked to restart.

I stopped the installation and burnt the image and used the disc to install instead but there seems to be some problem.. when i reach back tonite, i shall try disconnecting my internal hdd and use the vista disk to boot and install straight into my external hdd..

does this seem workable? i worked on this problem till 5 in the morning..

 

Triple Boot

Ok, have a lil problem. I have recently installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on a seperate IDE drive. I have XP Home on another SATA drive and XP Pro on another SATA drive. In my BIOS i have it to boot to my XP Home SATA drive and then ask me (using the boot.ini) which operating system I want to boot to. SInce i added VIsta I have heard now in a few places that it doesn't use boot.ini and therefore I can't boot to it without going into my BIOS (which is a pian in my a**). So I'm askin if anyone has an answer to my problem. I have added my boot.ini file as it stands right now keeping in mind the the last line where it points to Vista don't work. Thx


[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe= "Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /USENEWLOADER

 

Thanks for the reply. It's not the same though. I have a Seperate Hard drive with Vista and a seperate drive with the other 2 XP's. So it's not a matter of which partition. Because Vista was installed but itself. the boot.ini doesn't exist and therefore i can't reference to it. I'm looking for a work around

 

A little experience!
I took the plunge and installed Vista on the same HD as my XP Home, but in its own partition. This is on an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, Athlon XP+ 3200, 1.5GB DDR, and a GForce FX5500. All went well except for an extraordinarily long install time, all my hardware was detected, including two different Canon printers. It boots perfectly well, no conflicts yet.
I then modified my Linux box to accept Vista, I had to upgrade the graphics card to 128MB, so I installed what I thought was the same card as my Windows box has, a GForce FX5500, but this new card which came with a TV outlet fitted is on an Asrock K7VT4A Pro with a Sempron 2200, and 1GB DDR. The install went OK, no problems, but Vista will only recognise my monitor as generic Samsung, 8bit colour, and 800 x 600 resolution. Even after downloading and installing the nVidia beta driver for Vista it stays 800 x 600 with no options available.
The odd thing is that on my Windows box, using the same monitor, and nominally the same graphics card, XP runs on 32 bit colour and 1024 x 768.

As a matter of interest I then re-installed SuSE 10 on top of the Vista, (in the Linus box), SuSE installed in 25 minutes, and even without the nVidia driver runs the monitor at 1024 x 768, and will run at 1280 x 1024. SuSE recognised Vista and shows it in the boot screen.

AUC is a PIA, but the ability to report what programmes are slowing down the boots and shut-downs is excellent.

Roger

 

Roger,

Check the Samsung website and see if you can find a driver for your monitor (maybe the one for XP one would work?). XP did not recognize my Samsung monitor properly until I installed a driver for it. HTH

B

 

Golf003
You can’t boot Vista with the ntloader and the boot.ini file. It has its own new boot system which must be used.

From something I wrote,

Boot Magic, Partition Commander and Acronis OS Selector can’t boot WinNT from a second/third hard drive, so that would have to include Vista. I would think the excellent free XOSL could probably do it without issues, but this needs its own primary partition on the boot hard drive and I have not tested it yet.

 

****, ahahah Well I'll give that a shot and I will also try to see if maybe i can some how copy some files vista looks for while booting and see if i can reference to them using the ntloader. Slim to none chance but if i figure something out I will definetly post it. Thx guys

 

The Vista boot process is: partition boot record loads bootmgr, which queries BCD for the location of winload.exe and then runs it, which of course then boots Vista.

The bootmgr file is the equivalent of XP’s ntdetect.com and ntldr files. The BCD file is the equivalent of the boot.ini file. The bootmgr file does a lot more than just find and start Winload, it sets up the environment which allows it to run. Hence bootmgr is absolutely essential for booting Vista and must be the first in the boot process. Here’s the crunch though, bootmgr can only do its job from the boot hard drive.
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/windows-nt-6-boot-process.html

Your only options are to change the bios boot order as you’ve been doing; use a bootmanager that can emulate this bios change; or move bootmgr and BCD to the active primary on the boot drive and then alter its PBR to point to bootmgr, then edit BCD to point to the drive and partition where winload.exe is.


Edit:-
Something interesting and a correction to what I’ve just said. Just been testing XOSL and it works like a charm as always, but the thing is Vista boots with it from a second hard drive whether drive swapping is turned on or off. I was curious when GAG’s drive swapping seemed to work back-to-front and assumed it was some kind of incompatibility with GAG and Vista. With drive swapping turned on GAG failed to boot Vista, but XOSL boots it the same either way.

I think my belief that Vista’s bootmgr file had to be run from the boot drive was based on an assumption from how the ntloader operated. I’m thinking now that my previous tests that failed to get Vista to boot from another hard drive were probably down to something else, most likely incompatibilities with the bootmanagers I tried.

So, bootmgr seems to be able to drive swap all by itself, very interesting development. Unless of course it’s XOSL that is somehow responsible. I still can’t see a way to get the ntloader and boot.ini file to load it, but I’ll stand corrected.


Another Edit:-
The thought occurs that if you made a copy of the Vista partition boot sector and save it as suitable file in the root of Vista, then perhaps you could point boot.ini to that. After all that’s exactly how the ntloader boots a Win9x. If the Vista bootmgr can indeed run from a second hard drive all by itself then it might work. Perhaps bootpart could do it.

 

Ok, I can confirm I believe that a fully independent Vista will happily boot form a second or higher hard drive without Drive Swapping by a boot manager. I’ve tried it with two bootmanagers that can’t do this trick and both are booting Vista just fine. It must mean that all the Vista boot files are set to make their calls to the hard drive they are on, instead of to the boot hard drive. Cool, and points earned by Microsoft. It’s not even necessary to hide partitions on the boot drive.

Boot Magic 8.0 works fine and no apparent incompatibilities, even with Vista on the boot drive. I got the Paragon boot manager working perfect as well once I remembered there was an option to add unrecognised OSes. Neither of course can boot 2K/XP from anything other than the boot drive, so no use for you Golf003 with XP on your second drive.

If you are still working on trying to get the ntloader to boot Vista then you’re one step closer now that we know bootmgr will do its job from another drive. I’ve had some more thoughts on this. The ntloader is set to load the hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe files of the target OS and there would be no way to change this and still have it boot an XP install as well. So, what if you could create modified versions of there files in the Vista OS that instead of trying to boot XP, would simply start the boot sector code in the Vista PBR.

You would need to put the files in a new folder in the root of Vista and change the boot.ini file to point to this folder instead of the Windows folder.
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WHATEVER= "Microsoft Windows "¦..
It works cause I tried it. The first problem would be stopping the ntloader halting with an error when it didn’t get the expected response from the real hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe. The other might be if bootmgr conflicted with the ntloader files already running in memory.

Any coders out there looking for a project?

 

Reboot when running from USB HDD

Hi guys,

I've installed my Vista Beta 2 onto an external USB Hard Drive (XP on the primary internal drive). I get to the boot screen (the one with the flag and the scrolling line), and the line does a few passes, and then it just reboots on me. And then it goes to the boot loader, and then loads up Vista again, and keeps going in an endless cycle untill I tell it to eather boot XP or shut it down (I once left it for the day to re-install, hoping it would maybe fix the problem, and when I got back from school, it was still rebooting). Anyone know why this might be? I've sorta come to the conclusion that maybe Vista disables the USB device when booting, therefore not being able to find the files it needs? I'd install the drive inside my computer, but I don't have a jumper to set the drive as a slave.

Thanks a bunch,
Kevin

 

Hi Kevin, Welcome to the Forum. I’m afraid I can’t think what might be causing your problem and I don’t possess a USB hard drive to try it out. It may well be a Vista issue with the USB connection and the way the boot loader works. Have you tried making the USB drive the first boot hard drive in the bios and installing directly to it by booting from the Vista DVD. This will put all of the Vista files on the USB drive, instead of setting up the dualboot option with the internal hard drive - which means the bootmanager files are actually on the internal drive.

Shouldn’t be hard to find a jumper connector plug. I’m sure any computer shop could supply you with one, or you must have a mate or two who has an old CD drive lying around that you could take one from. You would almost certainly have to install Vista again on the hard drive if you connected it as an internal slave, but no harm trying the boot auto-repair option first.