Dual booting

[streetwolf]

Thought you guys might be able to help me out with the following before I actually gave it a try. I'd rather know in advance if it will work or not.

I want to try out Vista to see what all the hoopla is about. However I want to install it completely separate from my XP system. This rules out using the upgrade feature or the usual dual boot feature.

So what I thought I could do is to physically disconnect my C drive, which is my boot and XP drive, and in it's place connect a spare IDE drive, formatted and empty.

I would then boot up the Vista CD and install it to this 'new' C drive. I assume it would be the C drive as it's on the same IDE connector as my XP drive.

So when everything is complete my 'new' C drive will have Vista when I boot up my machine. I have other drives but I assume they will not be affected by Vista and I will not put anything Vista system related on them.

When I want to go back to XP all I have to do is disconnect the Vista drive and reconnect my XP drive in it's place. Boot up and I'm back to where I was before Vista. Neither OS is worse for the wear, I hope.

Does this meet my requirement to keep Vista and XP totally separate with the ability to go back and forth without screwing up either system?

Another idea I had was that after I install Vista on the new hard drive I could reconnect my XP drive again, hook up the Vista drive to my second IDE connector and use my BIOS to boot Vista from there. I assume doing this would cause my Vista drive to be my C drive and who knows what my other drives would become.

When I want to go back to XP all I have to do is boot normally as that drive is the first drive to boot.

Looking for some expert thoughts on this.

[Jito463]

Vista does allow you to dual-boot between it and older versions of Windows, but yes this will do what you want.

[streetwolf]

Thought you might be the first to reply to my question Jito.

The reason I don't want to do the usual dual booting is becasue I read of some cases in which doing so screwed up the XP side of things especially when Vista was uninstalled.

Maybe this was the beta versions and the RTM is OK on this issue. Anyway... that's why I thought of doing the dual booting my way. No chance of scewing up my XP system.

Let me ask this again. If after the install of Vista I rehook up the Vista drive to my second IDE channel and use my BIOS Boot menu to boot it from there will this Vista disk now become my C: drive?

This is important because the intitial install of Vista, in place of my current C drive, will have all it's reg entries, and other files, pointing to the C drive. If I then move it and boot it from a different IDE I still need the drive to be C otherwise files won't be found.

One more thing. I read a post where the person said that the install of Vista changed his CMOS. I don't know if this is true or even if it matters but have you heard of this?

If Vista does change it and I eventually swap my drives and boot from my XP drive I will still have the changes that Vista made to the CMOS. Perhaps the normal dual booting process handles this so there is no problem going between Vista and XP in a traditional dual boot situation.

Ah.... being anal is not always a good thing.

[Jito463]

Vista can't change the BIOS, so that's not a problem. As for your C drive, if the Vista drive is the first HDD on the list, it will become your C drive, yes.

[streetwolf]

Keep in mind that physically the Vista disk will be on my second IDE.

As far as booting with the BIOS goes there are two ways for me to do it.

The first is to actually change the boot order within my BIOS. I could put the Vista disk at the top of the list.

But an easier way is to bring up the built in Boot loading screen when I press the F8 key during POST processing. Here I can choose whatever disk I want to boot from including optical drives.

This list is the order of where the drive is physically placed I think. My Vista drive would not be the first drive on the list but somewhere down the list. So would booting from this list turn my Vista drive into C:? I am hoping it is a yes which I think it is but never having booted another OS from a different hard drive using this method I don't really know.

It is the second way I would like to use since I wouldn't have to keep changing and updating my BIOS every time I want to boot Vista.

Sounds like you never personally booted in this manner. I suppose then I will have to give it a go myself. I'll make sure to image my XP system before I try it in case I screw things up.

[Elandril]

Keep in mind that physically the Vista disk will be on my second IDE.

This should pose no problem, since Windows XP and Vista do not identify a drive by its "ide order", but rather by an id signature (volume id). Thus when you boot up from the Vista harddisk this one will become C:.

And since boot.ini stores the pathes to the ntloader using device/disk/partition paths, everything should go smooth on this level too.

[Jito463]

I suppose I should have clarified. What I meant was so long as the drive you're installing Vista on is the first drive *during installation*, then you'll be fine. After install, the boot order is set in the registry and it won't matter. Though it is possible to edit the system's boot drive letter after the fact through the registry.

[arisma]

You can use a boot manager, with it you can choose what partitions hide when you run WVista and what partitions hide when you run WXp.

Of course, you can install WVista in another hard disk without connect the other, and then use de Boot Menu of the motherboard or install another boot manager.

@Something like MasterBooter