Does anyone have both OS installed? If so, how does it work? Is it a good idea? A friend told me I should.
Oh, my system is damn near top of the line in case you need to know in order to answer.

In what sense? how does dual booting work? and depends on what your situation is work/gaming...or the need for 2 os

If you really want to use Vista then Dual booting is a good idea, because when you realize many software titles don't run on vista and other problems occur, at least XP is still installed.
In my opinion Vista is Junk, and yes I do use Vista. I still have Vista installed on my laptop with a Core2Duo and 2GB of Ram, but vista is painfully slow even in the most basic of tasks. I have however Upgraded my desktop back to XP, which I use for games.

I have dual booted Linux and Windows before, but not Windows and windows. You'll need to partition your Harddrive first with something like Partion manager. I am under the impression that Vista needs to be installed first, and then XP for the Dual boot to work. I remember reading this somewhere and I'll try to post a link.

I have Vista on one drive and xp on another and I choose which to boot from by my bios popup boot menu. I prefer this over the standard dual boot method.

If you prefer to put them on the same drive then partition it and install XP first then Vista. The Vista boot loader will add XP to the boot menu but not vise versa!

I think you will need full versions of both if you do this else the non-upgrade ver of Vista will kill your XP. Or so I have heard.

I have Vista as my main OS and there is nothing slow about it! Of course this is on a killer system, no delays, no hangs, just smooth as silk. I also have it on a laptop with an AMD dual core and 2 gigs ram and it's fine there too. I don't do a whole lot of heavy work on the laptop.

People who say Vista is slow must have a very different setup then me. As for games, Vista is neck and neck with xp, the frame rate gap is virtually gone. Here is the evidence; http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] ce_update/

OP - Please ignore Speedbird - He's been anti-Vista trolling for some time now, and seldom misses a chance to slam the OS and/or spread misinformation about it. As you can see, any post he makes here usually includes some back-handed slam in the place of any real information. We've tried talking to him before about it, but he's apparently not interested in listening or solving whatever issues me may (or may not...) be having. So meh...


The fact of the matter is that Vista runs all the latest titles, and nearly all the older stuff going back 3~4 years just fine. Older than that is kind of hit/miss. For programs of recent vintage, you have to LOOK to find stuff that doesn't work. I know that Adobe won't be updating their suite specifically for Vista - But most of their (Pro) customers run Mac anyhow. The reader works fine. Macromedia isn't going to release a 64 bit version of Flash any time soon, but you can install and run the 32 bit version on the 32 bit version of your browser of choice and never notice the difference.

As far as dual boot - XP first, Vista after. Vista doesn't use a boot manager like XP, but will automatically configure the XP one when it detects it. If you go the other way, XP will NOT properly configure the path to Vista, and you will have troubles until you manually repair the boot mgr.

i just installed vista 64 bit on my 2nd hard drive. the 1st has xp pro on it. no i can't boot back to my xp pro hd. i really need to get on that one. if i need to edit the boot registry tell me how lol

Here, see does this help: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=100672

I wanted to post a similar topic to this one. I just finished assembling my hardware and am ready to go. My friend has a Windows XP Pro Corporate edition he's lending me for the install but I also want to install Vista at some point, on the same machine.

Apparently I have three options, and would like some help deciding what to do:

1) Install XP Pro and use Partition magic or some other software to create another partition for the Vista install; then somehow boot from one or the other as needed (I really have no idea how to do this though)

2) Have two HD's with an operating system on each and use BIOS to boot from needed drive for Vista or XP (seems to be the best to me)

3) Have XP Pro and Vista on two separate HDD's and buy an HD hotswap 5.25" drive and just switch the drives as needed.

Oops, there's actually four ways:

4) Pay $200 for VMware workstation and run XP within Vista or vice versa (too expensive of an option)

At some point, I'd also like to have a version of Linux Fedora or Ubuntu on here. How the heck should I go about this and how exactly do i do it (easy steps or references to articles would be great). I'm a noob!

Yikes! Did I say install Vista first? It's because I'm dyselxic. Of course you install XP first for dual boot. XP second and you won't be able to boot vista.

I've seen a lot of documentation about creating a partition for vista and loading it next to XP, but I can't find anything about how it works if you put vista on a separate HDD and dual boot. Any thoughts?

It's the same process, except you skip the "Create Partition" part... The second drive will have it's own letter, yah?

So...say I already have XP Pro on a hard drive and I want to put vista on a separate hard drive. Can I just throw another hard drive in there, boot up from Vista DVD, and then the other hard drive will show up in options for installing Vista?

I have a brand new build with no operating system on yet. What I'm thinking about doing, instead of a different hard drive, is creating two primary partitions when I boot up and install XP, so then when I come back later, the Vista partition will already be there and I can install into that one. But I am still curious if the other way will work for 2 hard drives

Probably the safest way to do the 2 hard drive way is to put one drive in the PC and install an OS on it, either Vista or XP. Then take that drive out of the PC and put in another drive and install the other OS to it.

After that, put the first drive back in. Now there are 2 drives with bootable OSes in your PC. Your BIOS will then automatically boot from whichever hard drive is the designated 'first' hard drive in your BIOS.

Virtually any new motherboard/bios will allow you to go into CMOS setup and set the drive order. So, if the Vista drive is set to boot first, and you want to boot XP, you could just go into CMOS setup and set the XP drive as the first drive.

Now this would be a bit of a PITA if you do this often, thankfully there is an easier way still. Some, (perhaps most?) new systems will let you press a key on boot up (f8 on my Asus p5b deluxe, a moment after POST and way before Windows starts) which will bring up a pop up boot menu where you can also make the choice of which drive to boot - it's just a quick pop up menu, you don't enter CMOS setup at all.

This is no more inconvenient than a boot loader/dual boot approach. In both cases you have to remember to press a key or two during boot.

I have used this method and I think it's actually much better than putting two OSes on the same, partitioned, drive. For one thing, if your hard drive dies you will only loose one OS. You also don't have to worry about losing your boot loader configuration and figuring out what you would do if say the XP install were to die and you needed to reinstall.

WTF! please grow up...you have no right to start personal attacks like that.

Not everyone is going to have the same opinion as you 'I love Vista'. It's a fact of life that there's going to be pro supporters and critics of anything.

Please understand I'm not spreading misinformation,I reject that claim strongly. I'm stating my experiences of using Vista. If you can't deal with Vista critics and all you can do is stoop to personal attacks, that's your problem not mine.

Good day

Go with option #1. Why use two drives like that when you have to keep going into the BIOS to choose which OS to load? I have heard of some people doing that and I believe I read the reasoning a while ago but if you place both operating systems on one drive, you just go to the boot manager and choose the OS.

There is even some boot managers that can be set up or configured to go to the boot screen and wait for you to choose which one if you like it that way. That is my preferred configuration. That way, it doesn't always just boot to some operating system but you can also configure it to boot to the last chosen OS if you desire.

It is a difficult configuration but if you google and read a bit, you can figure it out. I am also installing Windows AND Linux operating systems on the same computer. Right now, at least, I am installing on the same drive and using a 2nd drive for my data and applications.

As a rule of thumb, always install Windows FIRST and always the OLDEST OS first. So, it would be like this:

Windows 2000 then Windows XP then Vista

Then install whatever Linux distro. Linux operating systems don't need to be in primary partitions and there is no required order.

The other rule is that you place Windows operating systems in the primary partitions. You should partition it so that you have at least 3. You would then install XP and aftwards, you install Vista. You can use a third party (open source) boot loader program to manage your partitions. I am doing this (just not with Vista yet as I don't have it) as it's a work in progress but I don't anticipate much difficulty. The only problem is deciding which method you want to use and which program/utility. There's some free ones out there that work well so that helps. If someone wishes to point out the definite advantage of installing each OS on separate hard drives, please explain. I thought it would be easier and more convenient to install on one drive and use the 2nd drive for your data and programs that don't need to be on the same OS partition (for e.g., on 'C').

Canuck1, I would have said the same thing a few years ago but now there is no need to go into bios to set the boot drive, not at least on my mobo, an ASUS p5b.

You simply press f8 upon boot and you get a pop up boot menu. It's actually the same amount as effort as using the windows boot manager in a conventional dual boot. See my post above. There are other advantages to the two hard drive BIOS select method and it has become quite popular now.

If my MOBO is unique in having this pop up boot menu then of course this advice becomes less useful.

I have to agree that your post amounted to trolling. You made a half a$$ed attempt to answer the OPs question, which was incorrect BTW, and then launched into an attack on Vista which had absolutely nothing to do with the OP. OBVIOUSLY the only reason you came here was to sling FUD about Vista and that is not even in question = trolling!

I hate to question your honesty but I find myself wondering if you have actually tried Vista at all. You probably read some trendy criticism of it and took off running on nothing but hate gas.

Meh - 7.4 on the "Feigned Indignation" scale... You can do better.