Vista+XP I wann Dual Boot from different Hard drives

Patrick · One Thousand

Right,I currently have a laptop on vista and it's time for something new soon.
80g hard drive running vista.
I plan to get my desktop built,not sure of exact specs quite yet but it'll be better than this laptop in many ways.
I was wondering as I would also like XP,ie runs fater generally etc. Would I be able to do that?
So my desktop would have two different drives containing the XP on one and Vista on the other,would that be possible?

Jack · Forum Donator

Definitely possible, although it's just as easy to setup a dual-boot system on a single hard drive. You'd just need to use separate partitions.

If you're hoping to just plug your laptop's hard drive into the computer and immediately boot Vista, you'll be extremely lucky if it works. You'll have all the wrong drivers and possibly an OEM version of the operating system, meaning that it's tied to your laptop's motherboard and will not work in your desktop.
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Patrick · One Thousand

Jack · Forum Donator

Assuming you're installing both operating systems on a new hard drive, you'll want to follow:

THIS GUIDE if you're installing Vista first, then XP
or
THIS GUIDE if you'll have XP installed first.

Although I have to disagree with XP being faster. That's certainly the case on lower-spec machines, but for (considerably) less than £400 you can build a PC which runs Vista perfectly so the difference will be negligible.

In fact, Vista makes better use of system resources. For example it will cache any unused RAM for quicker access - at the moment I technically have only 71mb free RAM of my 4GB. That's because Vista's "SuperFetch" loads your frequently used programs to the RAM which is 40x faster than loading from a hard drive.
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Adam1993 · The Cool Admin :)

^^ Yes what he said.

You need to use a partition manager to do this as the windows ones are basically crap.

Firstly split the hard drive into two bits. With a good partition manager you can allocate how much space is in each - so make the vista bit 70g and the windows xp one 10g (you can change this later).

Secondly, when its split, startup the computer with the xp cd inside it. The xp screen will start, eventually it will ask you where to install it to - install it to the new partition you made.

THen, when its installed, reboot your computer - it will ask you each time you start up your computer which operating system to start - in your case its vista and xp. (same as me).
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Jack · Forum Donator