Windows Vista Vista multiboot?

Hi,
I recently installed Windows Vista Ultimate But some programs do not work for those programs i want xp installed on a different partition i have my partition and xp disc ready the only problem is that xp will overwrite vistas boot manager so i will not be able to use vista. I have tried programs like "acronis boot manager" and "the one made by symnatec but they just detected xp.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Dale.

 

thankyou so much for that!

 

Thnaks Pete, I suspect this scenario is going to come up a lot

Regards - Charles

 

A different way of going about this is to install the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (it's free I think) and run XP inside the VM. It works quiet well for me, but I don't use it for much other than checking problems with the OS.

 

hi,
thanks for the reply i followed all the steps but vista will not repair the boot so i only have this operating system i also just notices there are no boot.ini file????

and thanks asasma but i cant even get into the operating system now!

i decided to get windows me instead of xp coz xp didnt usually work well for me...

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Update:
i tried installing windows 2000 to delete the bcdedit file coz then it shoukld of found something wrong as i was doing that it had to restart the setup so it didnt work then i got back to windows me then i was going to install acronis os selecter coz then it should of found somehting wrong i restarted and it came up with the nice gui then it told it it found a new partition so i thought oh i might be able to continue the setup so i told it windows 2000 was on that partition so then i chose windows 2000 off the list and then i was so suprised to see a green bar going across the screen!! lol!!

thankyou all for your help especially pete i would not of even attempted this without reading that article

Dale

 

Use Vista Boot manager

I used the Microsoft boot manager. You have the oldest system installed first. So that is XP. Then I installed 32 bit Vista -then 64bit Vista.

Have never had a multi-boot system before. But found the Vista boot manager easy and also free as it came with it.

Have had no problems and works well.

 

Vista has quite an advanced Boot Managment system that can be independantly installed. It's quite an advanced thing to do, but make yourself a Windows PE boot disk (Download WAIK), you may then use DISKPART and BCDEDIT to configure the boot manager to do almost anything. You can use diskpart and bcdedit to restore a Vista boot block and manager.

The other much simpler way to do it is to install Vista and XP on 2 seperate hard drives and boot from either one using your motherboard's boot menu (most modern motherboards have this, usually accesible at POST by pressing f8 or f12)

 

This is an excellent suggestion, but I would add that it can be RAM hungry. You probably need at least 1.5Gb RAM (1gb for vista and .5gb for the XP instance) to get decent performance. It would also be fairly straightforward to have an ME VM and a XP VM if you want.

If you've got a lot of RAM in the PC, it would be my favourite solution.