Windows Vista [Solution] Dual Boot Vista & XP with Grub

Ok.., Hi Guys & Girls.

To start off - Moderators you may like to move this post to another thread if its not suited here!.

I have spent a week of nights trying every posted solution I could find in the end I had to come up with a solution of my own.., I have posted this in the hope that it helps anyone with a similar problem.

My objective was to dual boot Vista and XP on a HP laptop "So one HDD" with a linux distro installed on a backup partition along with images of the vista and xp drives. -Laptops are for a mobile classroom-.

I wanted both of the installations to look like they were the only os when the pc has booted, So both vista and xp installed to their own C: drive. while being unable to see the other os's partition.

Up front problems:

-I only have a copy of the Vista restore cd's for the laptop and no normal Vista install cd.

-I needed to hide one drive from another.

-I did not know how to go about installing two different copy's of windows on the same hard drive without having different partition letters/drive letters.

-I needed a backup solution that would work under linux so that the students couldn't just play with it.
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There may be better solutions around -Here is mine-

This is in order of events.

-Restore vista install from recovery cd's
-shrink the vista partition = Right click on computer go to manage "disk management"
-Reboot into linux live cd i used the "system rescue cd" = it has all the tools you need and can be easily installed on the linux partition you will create.
-Use Gparted to remove the HP recovery partition.
-Use Gparted to create a ext2 format partition in the empty space of the drive = Mine was around 90Gig - The laptops have a 320Gig HDD.
-Mount the ext2 partition e.g. 'sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3' you will have to create the sda3 folder in the mnt directory before you mount the drive.
-Use FSarchiver to do a complete backup of your vista partition to your ext2 drive.
-When complete with no errors = Use Gparted to delete the ntfs partition where vista was.
-Use Gparted to create a partition on the drive the size that you would like for XP NOTE: in Gparted you MUST tell it how much blank space you would like before the partition starts I have 100Gig----- This must be enough to fit Vista.

So now you have a backup of Vista and your HDD should have blank space then an ntfs partition for XP and then a ext2 partition for the backups and linux.

-Reboot and install xp to your ntfs partition. no need to format that has been done-- Do NOT install xp onto the blank space on the drive thats for vista.

This will install XP on C:\ drive however C is mid way in the HDD so XP will look for the boot sector at the start of its partition.

So from here it is simple :

-Reboot into the live cd "system rescue cd ".
-mount your ext2 partition
-Use fsarchiver to do a backup of your XP Partition.
-Use Gparted to create a ntfs partition in the blank space of the drive.
-Use fsarchiver to restore your Vista backup to the new partition.

Now you have both os's on your system as if they are on c:\

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT REBOOT UNTIL YOU COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING !!!!!!!

-Install grub= if you are using 'system rescue cd' and your linux partition is on 'sda3' your code shout look something like this grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/sda3/boot /dev/sda
-Navigate to the boot folder on 'sda3' and edit your grub menu.lst file

-----IT MUST BE RIGHT----- or when you reboot you wont have any luck.

this is where you hide the drives and tell the computer what os you want to boot.

Mine looks like this for XP and Vista

title Win XP
unhide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
makeactive

title Win XP
unhide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

And thats it .., As i said there may be easier solutions out there however I couldn't find them.., Good luck hope this helps someone.

 

Thanks for sharing that, especially considering it's your first post. Welcome to our community.

I will add that it is a solution in the title.