Dual Booting Vista / XP with Seperate Hard Drives 3

[MDRuiz]

Okay, I know this might not be classical "dual booting" but I want to know if this makes sense.

I have discs for XP Pro and Vista Ultimate. I have three internal hard drives. Two for storage and one with XP Pro on there right now.

My plan is to install Vista one of my spare storage drives and from there on out use boot order to determine whether I'm sent into XP Pro or Vista.

It seems like the simplest / most foolproof way to dual boot. Anyone do this? Anything else I should be aware of? Like, should I disconnect my drive with XP on it while I'm installing Vista onto or something?

Thanks...

 

[BadBigBen]

If you want to do it the way you described, then it would be best if you disabled the XP drive (ergo unplug it) before you install Vista...

Vista tends to take over once it is installed, it will place BOOT files onto the ACTIVE partition, which XP would be if left in place...

after this, you would have to change the BOOT order according to which DRIVE should be active first, and all should be good to go...

PS: I have a TRIPLE boot on my work PC, (Vista, XP, and Linux), all separate, except that I allowed GRUB to be my BOOT LOADER and it works fine...



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[wolluf]

agree with Ben - I use

http://www.boot-us.com

as boot loader (installed on bootable CD so I don't touch the hard drives - used to use floppy, but haven't got floppy on vista machine).

 

[firewolfrl]

I use an old program called XOSL as my boot manager....what is most important is you have the capability to swap the harddrive virtually so the system is fooled into thinking that the drive you want to boot is the primary c:\ drive

Bootit NG is newer and has a good support system and will do what you need

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm

though the XOSL software is free and does work well....I use it to boot:
Vista 64
Vista 32
XP pro
Ubunta


there is a learning curve and you have to read all the help files

I would stick with the Bootit NG though


good luck

 

[wolluf]

firewolfrl - I thought all good boot managers made the booted system C:! Boot-us certainly does.

 

[MDRuiz]

Hey guys, thanks for the feedback.

I guess my question now is, why do I need a boot mananger? If I do what Ben outlines, why can I not simply just tell BIOS to look for either my original drive first if I want XP or look for my newer storage drive first in order to boot Vista?

 

[linney]

There is some information in the thread which you might find interesting and perhaps relevant.

Dual Boot and System Drives
thread1583-1356699

For myself, I'm happy with the old fashioned Windows (Vista) Boot Loader.

 

[wolluf]

If you use the bios you need to change bios settings every time you want to change boot drive. If you use a boot manager you get a menu to choose from (with default set as you want) - just boots whichever you choose.

 

[firewolfrl]

OK this is why I do not use the windows boot loader

first and foremost the windows bootloader uses the Active disk that it sees as the first boootup disk....
the boot record is installed and and that is that....your drive configuration has to stay the same and in the same order so it will boot correctly. so if you had a configuration as such Drive 0 loads the Vista 32 Drive 1 loads Vista 64 and Drive 2 loads XP pro
drive 0 would hold the boot record for drive 0,1,2 with corresponding drive letters C:,D:,E:
SO even if you went into the Vista 64 Registry and fooled it OS see itself as a C: in the boot record it will always be drive D:
so if you removed the current drive C: (vista32) and the Vista64 now becomes drive 0 ....it may not boot or load as it wants to be D: and you have now made it C:


basically it really has nothing to do with the Operating system. it has to do with how the drive sees itself as the Active boot drive

with a boot manager that has a swap drive option it will fool the drive into thinking that it is a drive 0 boot drive. You do this now via the Bios.

each drive that is fooled will load its own boot sector and think it is primary drive ....what this does is separate the drives and makes each OS independently bootable without depending on one drive for all the drives boot records

so as an example you had your drive 0 crash and die on you...you would be able to boot to the next drive without any issues ....if you used the windows boot manager it would give you an error

I view all windows boot managers as limited manager that is only good for booting the OS it resides on.

boot managers are not all made the same and no not always do they swap the drives...usually this is a setting that is checked to work. so you can have a boot manager that will boot to a second drive and not swap the drive and read the boot drive letter as not the primary boot drive


read this as an explanation (it is the xosl how to manual but gives a great explanation of active boot)

http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/faqhow/alphabet.txt

it is a bit old but this will apply to any OS with any file system.

just to note: this is for reading and learning...its not really any good for your setup as it still refers to fat tables ans limitations....but is does have some explanation


its late and I am tired so I hope this helps you somewhat...no one is wrong for this type of post and all the ones that reply such as Linney and Wolluf are very smart and give great advice....this is one of those tech gray areas that no one seems to agree on....lol

so I will say both Linney and Wolluf are right and so am I ...so its all how you interpret the info provided.

I wish you luck

 

[wolluf]

firewolfrl - I agree with you! (let windows boot managers boot their windows - leave proper management to a third party app). Thanks for the explanation.

I played around with a number of boot managers long time ago, found boot-us did exactly what I wanted (the better ones all allowed the booted o/s to be C. Things have moved on - but boot-us still does exactly what I want - so I haven't checked out any others for a while - and I tend to use virtual machines more.

 

[firewolfrl]

Thanks Wolluf,
its been a few years since I played with Boot-us. I wanted something I could boot and not mess with any of the drives.
I currently have mine to boot the 3rd harddrive which is my vista 64 and it gives me an autoboot...if I want to change I just have to hit the escape key in 4 seconds after xosl loads

for now I have been just using the Vista 64 and virtual XP Pro

Wolluf have you found good Virtual PC software besides Microsoft and Vmware...I am looking for one that the graphics are good and it has sound and mic....
lots of the ones out there have sound but no mic as they use directx drivers (virtual pc and vmware can use mic)


I want to test some games ....lol

 

[MDRuiz]

Thanks for all the good info guys. I'm going to try to do this tonight and hopefully will be back on soon to report my experience.

 

[MDRuiz]

Serves me right for going in thinking anything would be simple or easy.

Here's my new status:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1449080&page=1

Basically my Mobo seemed to be very fickle and it wouldn't give me a signal to the monitor once I uplugged my XP drive. So I plugged it back in and began the Vista installation from windows...I was willing to bite the bullet and try to deal with installing it this way. And it seemed to work fine until I got stuck again not being able to get a signal to the monitor. This time all the drives or none of the drives plugged in doesn't make a difference.