Dual boot Vista and XP help

[Toko]

A friend bought a brand new HP lap with 2x120GB drives.The 1 has already been partitioned into 2 drives C: and the recovery drive.C: has Vista pre-installed.

He then partitioned the secondary drive into 2 segments, 20GB for XP and 100GB backup in the event that he has to format he doesn't lose any data.
This is how I advised him to do it as it has always worked well for me.

Installed XP in the 20GB drive and it boots directly into XP, tried F8 but it doesnt bring up the command prompt.Bios on the machine doesn't allow you to specify from which drive it should boot.

Formatted the secondary drive with XP on to see if it will now start with Vista but doesn't work either just gives an error message.

How can he get his machine to bring up the option that allows him to dualboot?

 

[cryptic1]

Well format the two drives now and start all over again. Install XP first (boot off cd). Once this installation is done insert Vista cd and boot off cd again. Vista will automatically pick up the partitions where u want to install it (Vista).

There should be dual boot after installing Vista - make sure u boot off the hard drive after the installation.

Hope this helps

 

[ebudae]

Try This

I did exactly the same thing, I installed Xp after Vista. To get both OS to operate from one hd drive, do the following after XP is installed:

- Repair your vista install using the repair process provided during Vista setup
- Now XP won't boot
- Boot into vista and download and run a program called EasyBCD
- Add Windows XP as a boot entry using EasyBCD
- Note that this still wont fix your problem
- now copy ntldr to the drive where XP is installed. You can get it off the XP setup disk or find it in the root folder of your c: drive.

Voila!

Well at least it worked for me. Hope it helps.

 

[kronoSX]

Rather have 2 hdd,and this will be more managed.DO as above 2nd reply but with 2 hdd.

 

[Browser]

When dual booting you should install the older OS first, because how is an older OS supposed to set things up to work with an OS that didn't exsist when it was released.

Well it could work fine if Microsoft bothered doing anything usefull with Vista. Personally I would just upgrade the Vista Installation to XP.

 

[Browser]

GRRRR, double post, having problems with this "wonderfull" internet. Though it only seems to be happening with this forum.