Windows Vista Dual booting vista and XP on two hard drives

Hi Guys
i have read the threads on dual booting and am getting confused.
i have two hard drives one with XP the other with Vista 32
i am trying to get them to dual boot at start up ie giving me the option on which OS to boot into.
i have down loaded a boot manager but can not get the confoguration right
can any one iether point me to a post or helpprovide step by step instructions for an idiot on how to set up the Dual boot?
i know this has been asked before please be gentle with me

 

You haven't said as much but it sounds as though you have installed them separately, i.e. one HDD at a time.

Anyway, this should sort you out, download VistaBootPro from here http://www.pro-networks.org/vistabootpro/ to the Vista installation.

Edit: Sorry, you must download it to the operating system that is designated as drive C.

 

Hi BurrWalnut
many thanks
i have down loaded Vista Boot pro to the vista Drive (drive C), sorry for not saying much, however you are correct i have two WD 300gb Hard Drives I have installed XP on one and then loaded Vista on the second one (I disconected the Xp drive prior to the Vista Install) then reconnected the Xp hard Drive.
Vista takes priority and loads once in Vista i can see the Xp Drive as :F.
all i have to do now is figure out how to operate Boot pro.

 

I don't know if you have done this but make sure the little jumper on the back of the Vista HDD is set to master and the XP drive to slave.

I'm not on a Vista PC at the moment but I think that VistaBootPro has options to check boot parameters.

 

Hello aussiegreen and welcome to the Board,

If you've done it that way, installed Vista with the XP drive disconnected, there isn't a dual boot as such and a boot manager is superfluous.

Dual Boot with Two Drives
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=61924

 

Hi aussiegreen.

I have almost the exact same setup. I did not want Vista to interfere with my XP on my drive C so I installed it on another drive. When I want to boot Vista I just hit the ESC key on bootup and the bios brings up a list of drives and allows me to boot from anywhere and that drive becomes Drive-C. Works perfectly. The original drive C becomes another drive letter depending on how many hard drives I have installed at that particular time (I have a bunch of plug-in parallel drives).

If your motherboard has the ESC on bootup feature and allows you to pick the boot up drive that should solve your problem. Give it a try.

Giles

 

Thanks charlesvar and giles
I have found that my mother board does support dual boot and i have to press F8 i can then choose between hard drives.
i have also taken the computer back to the shop and had the tech guys reset up the dual boot which will give me a chance to see what they have done. once i have every thing on paper i will post the results so you can check it out.

once again thank you you have been very helpfull

 

VistaBoot Pro

I have two 64bit PC's set up as triple boot Vista 32 and 64 and Windows XP.

I have found the freeware VistaBoot Pro handy as I do not need to choose the startup system. Have one system automatically booting into Vista 32 and the other automatically booting into Windows XP.