Running Vista and XP on seperate drives?

[Daftpanzer]

Just wondering if anyone here has Vista and XP installed on separate hard drives? IE so you can choose which OS to boot up with by changing the drive boot priority in BIOS, easy peasy, and thus get around those compatibility issues without some kind of dual-boot nightmare?

I've started reading up about this, but there seems to be some issues if Vista is installed first. The consensus seems to be get XP installed first, then install Vista. However, I just got a new PC with Vista pre-loaded, and I'm not too keen on uninstalling it unless absolutely necessary, since I've already spent a bit of time fiddling with it and installing stuff.

Currently, the new machine has Vista on its single 250gb drive. I have an almost-empty 500 gb backup drive sitting in my older PC, thats the one I plan to use for XP and most apps and stuff.

Well, thanks for any replies

 

[Speedo]

Just disconnect the Vista drive, connect the XP drive, install XP, reconnect the Vista drive and go.

Nothing really complicated to it.

 

[GenMarshall]

It's almost like having a separate partition in your primary HD, but instead of one, you have to constantly swap your HD.

 

[Padma]

Personally, it sounds like more trouble than simple dual-booting....

 

[Strider]

When I use to dual-boot Windows/Linux I had very little problems. Although now windows has been removed completely.

 

[Speedo]

Personally, it sounds like more trouble than simple dual-booting....

It really is, but for people who don't want to mess with bootloaders and etc...

 

[Daftpanzer]

Thanks,

It's almost like having a separate partition in your primary HD, but instead of one, you have to constantly swap your HD.

As I understand, its possible to switch the HD boot priority just by altering the BIOS settings at startup. Im thinking that allows you to choose either Vista HD or XP HD to boot with. Is that possible? I definately wouldn't want to be physically inserting and removing HD's all the time!

 

[IamJohn]

Yeah, it's possible. On my computer all you have to do is hit f11 and it brings up a menu asking you where to boot from.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Yeah, it's possible. On my computer all you have to do is hit f11 and it brings up a menu asking you where to boot from.

@IamJohn, its a similar setup on my new PC. Do you actually have two seperate OS's running on two drives? It would be great to hear from someone who has actually done this

 

[IamJohn]

For awhile I had ubuntu running on a 120gb usb drive I had, with XP on the main drive. All I did was install ubuntu on the drive (and tell it not to install grub). Later versions of linux however didn't like that type of setup so I partitioned my main hard drive and run linux from there (and I formated the old linux hard drive to NTFS and use that for storage).

I couldn't just take out my real hard drive because I use a laptop, but it sounds like Speedo's solution of just removing the Vista hard drive should work.

Remember that if you have problems with the bootloader (ie vista installs over the XP one, or vice versa) you can use your setup CD disk to reinstall the bootloader. Just make sure the computer is set up correctly, with the disk that has priority having the bootloader, as that caused some problems for me.

I also found that Supergrub helped me (though it's mainly meant for the linux grub bootloader), I burnt it onto a disk, booted off of that, and it allowed me to choose where to boot from, even if the computer wouldn't normally allow me to boot onto XP or Ubuntu.

 

[Adamb0mb]

I got my dual boot to work by first installing XP and then installing vista on another partition from the cd. This automatically set up my dual boot menu so I can choose which OS to use at startup.

I think it's good to have XP installed first because it is easier for Vista to recognize and reconfigure an XP boot than for XP to recognize and reconfigure a Vista boot.