Questions about installing Vista and WinXP on the same drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Oenone
  • Start date Start date
O

Oenone

I've been trying without success for some time now to get Vista Ultimate RTM
to install on a stand-alone second hard drive in my system (see the recent
thread, "Can't get Vista to boot"). I'm attempting a clean install, booting
from the installation DVD, not an upgrade from inside Window.

As I'm running out of ideas why it's not booting, I'm considering the option
of installing Vista onto another partition of the drive containing my WinXP
installation (which I want to keep).

Whilst I've felt fairly comfortable playing around with Vista on a second
drive, I'm a bit nervous about installing it on the same drive as XP just in
case it affects the existing installation in some way... So before I start I
have some questions:

1. So far all my Vista installations seem to have been oblivious to WinXP
being on another drive. I haven't had any OS selection menus appear after
the POST. Is this the expected behaviour under these circumstances?

2. If I install Vista on the same drive as WinXP (different partition), will
Vista automatically detect WinXP and ensure that an OS selection menu does
appear?

3. If I later decide to uninstall Vista and return to WinXP, can I get rid
of the boot menu so that it immediately boots into XP? How would I remove
Vista in order to achieve this?

4. If I later instead decide to uninstall XP and only retain Vista, can I
get rid of the boot menu then? It will obviously mean that I'm booting into
a partition that isn't the first one on the disk (that's where XP used to
be), is that going to cause any problems?

I'm very concerned about rebooting after installation to find that it
automatically boots into Vista and gives me no option to get back into XP...

Many thanks,
 
Hi Oenone,

You can certainly do this instead.
1. So far all my Vista installations seem to have been oblivious to WinXP
being on another drive. I haven't had any OS selection menus appear after
the POST. Is this the expected behaviour under these circumstances?
Click to expand...

Since your bootloaders isn't being written to a drive, no multiboot
information is ever created.
2. If I install Vista on the same drive as WinXP (different partition),
will Vista automatically detect WinXP and ensure that an OS selection menu
does appear?
Click to expand...

Yes, and you will also like find that the boot files for Vista are written
to the XP volume, this is normal as the boot files must be written to the
active volume.
3. If I later decide to uninstall Vista and return to WinXP, can I get rid
of the boot menu so that it immediately boots into XP? How would I remove
Vista in order to achieve this?
Click to expand...

Actually, it's not too difficult. You simply boot the system with the XP CD
and enter the Recovery Console. After logging on to the installation, run
fixmbr and fixboot to reactivate ntldr as the primary bootloader. Exit the
console, remove the CD and reboot. Format the Vista install after verifying
that it boots directly to XP.
4. If I later instead decide to uninstall XP and only retain Vista, can I
get rid of the boot menu then? It will obviously mean that I'm booting
into a partition that isn't the first one on the disk (that's where XP
used to be), is that going to cause any problems?
Click to expand...

Yes, there is a tool called bcdedit that can be used to do this from an
elevated command prompt (won't work if it's not elevated). However, be
mindful that the boot files are not on the same volume as Vista.
I'm very concerned about rebooting after installation to find that it
automatically boots into Vista and gives me no option to get back into
XP...
Click to expand...

Even if it did, you could add XP using bcdedit, there is an easier third
party tool called VistaBootPro that can do this as well, though I've not
found a need for it yet.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
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