Dual Boot - Two Drives, XP and Vista

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Guest

I have a machine with XP Pro on the hard drive. I disconnected the XP hard
drive and connected a second hard drive on which I installed Vista Beta
(5384). To switch operating systems, I have been disconnecting one hard
drive and attaching the other hard drive.

I want to set up my current configuration as a dual boot system, WITHOUT
having to reinstall either operating system. Can this be done WITHOUT having
to reinstall either operating system (assuming that one hard drive is setup
as master and the other as slave, on the same channel, or assuming that the
hard drives are on different channels)? Or do I, for example, have to remove
Vista from the second hard drive and reinstall Vista on the clean second hard
drive from 'within' XP? Thank you...Vaughn !:-)

PS - I prefer to do this without third party software, such as Vista Boot
PRO, if possible.
 
Hi Vaughn,

I'm not sure if this will work for you. I have a Sony Vaio sytem set up the
same as you. 2 internal hard drives one master and one slave. I have one with
XP and one with Vista.

When I want to run Vista I go into the BIOS at boot up and switch the
primary (boot up) drive to the one with Vista, then re-boot. When I want to
go back to XP just reboot, go into BIOS and switch back to XP drive. Works
quite well for me. Two seperate operating systems in one box. Check your BIOS
you may have the ability to do it as well. Of course be careful in the BIOS.

This may not be the easiest way to do it but it does work.

Mark
 
I have a Windows 2000 operating system on one hard drive which I have
connected as the primary master, and a Windows Vista Beta 2 operating system
on a second hard drive connected as the secondary master.

I took the Windows 2000 drive out of the system when I installed Windows
Vista, so the Vista boot loader doesn't know about the Windows 2000 drive.

I set the boot order in BIOS to select which drive I want to boot to.

I have also tried to get the Vista boot manager to "see" the Windows 2000
drive and boot it, but I haven't figured out how to do it.

I used VistBootPRO to create the second operating system description in the
Boot Configuration Data, but It uses drive letters, instead of the hardware
descriptors that boot.sys uses.

I have gone to the Microsoft site trying to get more information, but I
haven't been able to find much. The technical information has not been
helpful, but I have just found a new document called "Boot Configuration
Data in Windows Vista", which I haven't read yet, but which I hope will have
better information.

Todd
 
My situation exactly. I left the boot order with Vista as the first in boot
order. I then copied the boot.ini and ntdetect.com and ntldr to the Vista
drive from your XP drive. I then downloaded the utility recommended by
Colin several times, he says:
You can download this tool from http://www.vistabootpro.org/intro.php. It
is free
Then you add a legacy system. This will give you a first boot with a choice
between vista and legacy, and if you chose the legacy, you will get the
boot.ini menu or go straight to the xp system if you only have one system (I
have several)
Set the timeouts to your preferences.
 
Forgot to mention you will have to adjust the boot.ini entry(entries) to
reflect the current enumeration. You can play with it or do a bootcfg
/rebuild from the XP recovery console
 
Not only did I not want to reinstall either operating system, I also want the
switching between operating systems to be 'unattended'. The easiest way that
I found to do this was as follows:
1. I setup the XP disk as master and the Vista disk as slave on the primary
channel.

2. When I turn on the machine, it is set to automatically boot to XP.

3. When I insert a Vista floppy boot disk, the machine boots to Vista
'unattended'.

4. Switching back and forth between XP and Vista is as simple as booting
with/without the Vista floppy boot disk.

The Vista boot disk is prepared by formatting a floppy disk and copying from
Vista to the formatted floppy drive the "bootmgr" file to the 'root'
directory on the floppy disk and the "bcd" file into a directory named 'boot'
on the floppy disk. The Boot Floppy procedure is from the following link:

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=55427
 
Ok let me help all of you. I spent a long time on hear reading this and that
about having two hard drives and dual boot. ANd listening how your unplugging
this and that. Let me tell you how this was done and how in now works on my
machine. I had C drive with XP PRO. I had E drive which was a drive I ruined
the MBT on so I was having my machine boot to c then having access to the old
E drive through it. SO I wanted to install Vista and have a dual boot
machine. I downloaded the Program burned it to DVD and installed. I at this
time did not move the cables or anything. I did though give me C drive a name
XP PRO C, just so I did not get confused. When i went to install Vista it
said what drive. I said E. It then told me there were files and they would be
placed into a folder called Old E drive Files. So I installed vista it did
its driver updating on its own. WHen it was finished I did not have to go to
bios or anything. when the computer restarted I had two choices 1 microsoft
windows 2 earlier version Microsoft(XP Pro in this case) and that was that. I
now have a perfectly installed Dual boot machine. So for you who unplugged
and installed then plug your other drive in dont do it that way. Leave both
drives in Re-install Vista to the drive you want and the OS will configure
itself. No unplugging cables or changing Bios. Its when you load with only
one drive it configures for singe boot drive you creat the problems becuase
when the OS installed it did not know of the other drive and did not
configure itself to dual boot. I hope this helps. dont over complicate
things. Leave both drives. If you only have one Drive then split /partitiion
it and load vista onto the new partition.
 
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