Dual Boot PC (Vista and XP)
 

I've got an XP PC with 2 drives and wanted to make the second drive bootable with Vista. When I Install it I'll obviously specify D drive for the install, but what I want is a menu at startup where I can choose either XP (ob C drive) or Vista (on D drive). Does that happen automatically or will I need to does this manually - if so how!?

alot of motherboards have bios options that allow you to choose which device to boot from. every manufacturer is different though, depends which board you have/which bios version etc.
if you're a little cluey with computers, go into bios on startup and have a looksy, see if there is an option to always chose boot device on startup

one question though - why do you need both?

I know that if you install the two operating systems on different partitions of the same drive a message pops up saying "an older version of Windows has been detected" and asks you to select which one you want to boot - Vista or XP.

I'm not sure if this will happen where they are installed on two different drives - the computer will only search for an OS on the selected boot drive right :confused:

On my bootup I have to hit F8 very early in the bootup sequence and I'll get an option of drives to boot up from

Vista will create its own boot menu for you.

You will have the choice of the 2 operating systems.

This should work on 2 physical drives the same as it will work with 1 drive 2 partitions.

[QUOTE=colonel wrx]

one question though - why do you need both?[/QUOTE]

Pretty happy with XP, but want to try out Vista on my home PC. Not sure how it will run, it's an old P4 with a 2.4g cpu, but it's got 2gb ram. If it runs like a dog or much slower than XP, I'll just reformat it and stick with XP. I've got Vista running OK on my work laptop, but I've seen it running pretty slowly on other people's PCs.

Windows 7 is already in its Release Candidate stage.

It has the speed of XP and the looks and features of VISTA.

Windows 7 is due out in a few months time.

[QUOTE=Luigi]Windows 7 is already in its Release Candidate stage.

It has the speed of XP and the looks and features of VISTA.

Windows 7 is due out in a few months time.[/QUOTE]

Yeah so I've heard. But I've got a free copy of Vista. I'm guessing since most companies are still on XP, with 7 coming out, they'll just skip Vista and go straight to 7? I wonder if MS even made a profit with Vista?

download and install VMware (virtual machine), and then you can create as many operating systems as you want... i have a few for my development machines.

or windows HyperV