Dual Boot Vista and XP?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stan Kay
  • Start date Start date
My system comprises a 150Gb Western Digital WD1500ADFD which is already
partitioned. Windows XP Pro is installed on a 75Gb partition and I wanted
to setup Vista Ultimate on the other 75Gb partition. Data is not an issue
on this disk because I also have three 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS disks in
RAID 5 for my data.

From the advice received, I shall boot into XP and then use my Vista DVD to
set up the dual boot. I have previously set up a dual boot with XP and
Vista Beta 2 and, like many of you, encountered problems if I looked at the
Vista partition from XP. The bitlocker solution seems to cover this problem
and so I shall try that suggestion.

Many thanks to everyone for your kind and helpful responses.
 
That's interesting. Sorry to hear that. BTW, I've noticed in checking out
Startup Repair and other ways to rescue or fix Vista, because you don't have
to be in a no boot situation for Startup repair to help you, that system
restore may work from Startup Repair when it will not work from F8's
options.

LOL here's the thing about LKG. It's success is such a long shot aka "hail
mary pass" to begin with, that it'd be hard to 1) miss it 2) determine if
the dual boot situation whacks it to be elegant. I mean it has a really low
percent of success. When it works great. The other sort of important
element of LKG is say you haven't booted for a good while. It's not going
to track changes made the way restore points will. It's going back to the
last stable boot and that could have been a good while ago if you just
didn't happen to boot for days.

CH
 
Colin Barnhorst said:
I wish it were only the restore points. It also wipes backups, previous
versions, and CompletePC backup images (if still connected to the
computer). I haven't tried it, but I suspect it also kills the Last Known
Good Configuration as well.
Click to expand...

Colin:

Vista (and XP) LKG Control Sets are part of the registry and therefore
should not be affected by dual booting.

I just reviewed both registries and ran LKG for both and did not see
anything indicating a problem.
 
Chad wrote:
LOL here's the thing about LKG [Last Known Good Configuration]. It's
success is such a long shot aka "hail mary pass" to begin with, that it'd
be hard to 1) miss it 2) determine if
the dual boot situation whacks it to be elegant. I mean it has a really low
percent of success. When it works great. The other sort of important
element of LKG is say you haven't booted for a good while. It's not going
to track changes made the way restore points will. It's going back to the
last stable boot and that could have been a good while ago if you just
didn't happen to boot for days.

Chad:

IMO, the LKG has a "high percent of success" for what it was intended to do.
Remember that the LKG system is only for startup issues

All startup-related data that must be stored (rather than computed during
startup) is saved in the System hive (a hive is a section of the registry
that appears as a file on your hard disk).

All of the data required to control startup is gathered into subkeys called
control sets in the Registry.
Control sets are stored in the hkey_local_machine subtree, under the System
key.
The Select subkey has an entry that states which of the control sets is used
as the LastKnownGood control set.
 
I am not talking about not being able to install or run it on the XP
partition, Andre, I am talking about all the folks that tried to use it
after installing Vista. Using it from XP they consistently report an error
105 and most report that after they cannot use Vista. Copied below is one
post, you can search for others.
 
What is the issue with using Partition Magic (version 8) on a drive with
Vista installed?
 
whats the reason to have it? ideally you want to plan ahead and set your
partitions once on a drive before installing an OS
 
The issue is that Partition Magic will not work with Vista created/formatted
partitions. P/M will show any drive containing such as corrupted, and offer
to repair the drive. If you are foolish enough to say yes, you have lost the
entire drive.

Use Acronis Disk Manager instead from a bootable CD that you can create
while within Windows XP.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Well, sometimes it doesn't work that way.

For the purpose of my question, assume one of two scenarios:

1. That XP and Vista are installed dual boot on the same drive,
Partition Magic is only installed under, and only run under XP. And
also that I don't care about system restore points or shadow copy at all.

Or

2. I have a drive with Vista [only] on it. But to run Partition Magic
on that drive, I connect that drive, as a second drive, to another
computer (via IDE, SATA or USB) that is running XP, and that has
Partition Magic installed and running on that other drive under XP, and
I use PM to adjust the partitions of the Vista drive. Again, I don't
care about restore points or shadow copy.

What problems will either of these cause?
 
Ok, but if I accept that as the case, can I use Partition Magic to
adjust the partition sizes of a drive to which Vista will be installed
BEFORE I install Vista? Vista would then be installing itself into a
partition created by or resized by Vista (but prior to the Vista
installation).

Or, in such a case, would Vista leave the partition's format in it's
previous (XP or Partition Magic) format, and live in and work in that
(pre-Vista) format? In which case subsequent use of Partition Magic on
the partition (with Vista now installed) might work ok?
 
The issue is that Partition Magic will not work with Vista created/formatted
partitions. P/M will show any drive containing such as corrupted, and offer
to repair the drive. If you are foolish enough to say yes, you have lost the
entire drive.
Click to expand...

Of course, there are those of us who have used PM dozens of times on Vista
drives and partitions without incident. I do suggest you do it from a
clean boot however.
 
Vista installs with a different version of NTFS than PM knows about,
therefore the problem. I haven't seen a post in several months, but with
beta2 and maybe RC1 there were reports of problems developing later on
volumes created with PM. I personally will not use it because of the
reports.
 
I have a HP laptop - removed the recovery partition - used Partition Magic
to create a new partition in which I installed Vista no problems.

Barry Watzman said:
Well, sometimes it doesn't work that way.

For the purpose of my question, assume one of two scenarios:

1. That XP and Vista are installed dual boot on the same drive, Partition
Magic is only installed under, and only run under XP. And also that I
don't care about system restore points or shadow copy at all.

Or

2. I have a drive with Vista [only] on it. But to run Partition Magic on
that drive, I connect that drive, as a second drive, to another computer
(via IDE, SATA or USB) that is running XP, and that has Partition Magic
installed and running on that other drive under XP, and I use PM to adjust
the partitions of the Vista drive. Again, I don't care about restore
points or shadow copy.

What problems will either of these cause?


Troy said:
whats the reason to have it? ideally you want to plan ahead and set your
partitions once on a drive before installing an OS
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
That's right. Vista will run fine. Now boot up your computer with the 2
floppies you create from within P/M.

P/M will show the drive as corrupted and offer to "repair" the problem.
Don't allow this to happen. You will lose everything on the entire drive.

It happened to me. I have "seen" it happen to another. I have read here
about it happening to various others also.

Thought I used P/M since 1992, I can no longer recommend it to people who
are using Vista.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!



AJR said:
I have a HP laptop - removed the recovery partition - used Partition Magic
to create a new partition in which I installed Vista no problems.

Barry Watzman said:
Well, sometimes it doesn't work that way.

For the purpose of my question, assume one of two scenarios:

1. That XP and Vista are installed dual boot on the same drive,
Partition Magic is only installed under, and only run under XP. And also
that I don't care about system restore points or shadow copy at all.

Or

2. I have a drive with Vista [only] on it. But to run Partition Magic
on that drive, I connect that drive, as a second drive, to another
computer (via IDE, SATA or USB) that is running XP, and that has
Partition Magic installed and running on that other drive under XP, and I
use PM to adjust the partitions of the Vista drive. Again, I don't care
about restore points or shadow copy.

What problems will either of these cause?


Troy said:
whats the reason to have it? ideally you want to plan ahead and set your
partitions once on a drive before installing an OS



What is the issue with using Partition Magic (version 8) on a drive
with Vista installed?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
John Barnes said:
Vista installs with a different version of NTFS than PM knows about,
therefore the problem. I haven't seen a post in several months, but with
beta2 and maybe RC1 there were reports of problems developing later on
volumes created with PM. I personally will not use it because of the
reports.
Click to expand...

The same thing happened when XP was released. NTFS has changed, and PM
doesn't know about it yet. Rest assured it will be updated shortly.

Mike
 
I used the product for years when it was from PowerQuest, however I do not
trust and will not install anything from Symantec/Norton.
 
Note that BootMagic won't and in my experience just having it installed
but not switching any systems stopped VISTA from installing.

I did install VISTA on a hrd drive partitioned with PM8 and had no
problems with that.

Others have indicated not to try any repair tools in PM once you have
VISTA installed.
 
Use Acronis Disk Manager instead from a bootable CD that you can create
while within Windows XP.

Richard:

I am waiting for Acronis to officially include Vista compatibility in Disk
Manager 10.0 before I purchase it.

Have you had any problems with moving vols & free space in Vista RTM?

TIA
 
Hi Richard,
I think that happened to me. After I installed Vista RC1 I got a error 105 in PM so I deleted the partition and just
went back to XP.
At that time I didn't know about the SR problems with a duel boot.
The issue is that Partition Magic will not work with Vista created/formatted
partitions. P/M will show any drive containing such as corrupted, and offer
to repair the drive. If you are foolish enough to say yes, you have lost the
entire drive.

Use Acronis Disk Manager instead from a bootable CD that you can create
while within Windows XP.
Click to expand...

Have a good day,
RScotti

remove "nospam" in order to email me.
 
I created the boot CD from within Windows XP. It contains both Disk Manager
and TrueImage HOME 10.0.

When booting from the CD I can work with the Vista partitions, resizing same
etc. Partition I create are seen and usable by Vista. More important, Disk
Manager sees, and works with, Vista created partitions.

So far I have not run into any problems due to Disk Manager.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
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