Hello, I'm getting Vista Home Premium in a couple days and this question deals with Operating Systems and Hard Drives in general.

Currently I have Windows XP Pro on my C:, a 80 GB HDD. I want to put Windows Vista on my newer HDD a 320 GB that I have set to drive W:.

My question is, Is it possible to install Windows Vista on my 320GB HDD, have my 320GB HDD be the drive Windows boots from, and also be able to access my current 80GB HDD with XP on it without any problems and be able to use, open programs, and access information on the 80 GB drive under Windows Vista?

I want to have my newer 320 GB HDD be the one the system boots the OS from, that's Vista, and I'm thinking about formatting my old 80GB HDD after i get Vista installed anyways.

Also, should I unplug the 80GB HDD before I install Vista so I make sure it goes onto my 320 GB drive?

I've googled around for answers, and so far it seems like I have to set my Western Digital 320 GB HDD to be the target of my BIOS to boot up Windows.

yeah thats what you need to do.and you should have a dual boot OS.

You don't need to unplug anything really.

Check out your boot options and boot priorities in you bios... There are a wealth of options to do that. You can choose between which drive and so on.

goodluck

why go Vista? Vista's eye candy is a waste of ram! (uses like 500mb more ram then XP)

What are you talking about i have a full gig left from my 8 gigs . For real, super fetch loads things that you use often and keeps them cached for faster loads. Vista, like XP will purge ram when its needed by other things. Whats the point in having ram that sits idle 90% of the time, it may as well be used for something.

By the same right XP used tons of ram compared to 98. XP also had all the same problems of a new OS vista had(and lots of them are driver related).

I am not gonna say run out and get vista for no reason, but its the users choice.

Back on topic. You can use 2 drives fine, you will have to select the boot drive in the bios first(for booting one os or the other.). accessing the 80gig will be fine

Thanks for the replies guys. So I'm just going to change the boot order in BIOS and there will be no need to wipe my old 80gb drive.

You are correct.

I went to Vista 1month ago. I am going back to XP. Why, cause every other time there is an error of some sort, whether it locked up or updates being applied I would have to go the extra mile to get it to boot again. Always seemed to corrupt the MBR. I noticed gaming wasn't as good even with Direct X 10. I wish it to get better cause I enjoyed the eye candy and the layout. I even tried different harddrives and notice the problems continuing.

Goodluck with yours. Mine was Vista Ultimate on a pretty good machine.

No, Vista will not be able to run your programs that are installed on the 80 Gig Drive. You will have to reinstall on vista.

Here is what I would do ,if possible ( Basicly what I have on my system).

(1) back up any data from 320 gig drive. Delete the partition. Power down and disconnect your 80 gig drive. (This prevents a Software dual boot)

(2) Boot to vista install disk. When vista ask about setting up a partition, set a primary partition of 50 Gigs. You can go ahead and create a 2nd partition using the remainder of the drive. Now tell vista to install on the 50 gig partition. After loading vista, you can set logical drive using vista disk management. Now load programs and verify your vista is working fine.

You should now have C: vista, and a d: for your data.

Reconnect your 80 gig drive. You can select which operating system to boot to in bios. You don't identify your motherboard, On mine I can hit f12 while booting and it brings up the boot menu which does not alter your boot priorities in Bios.

Both vista and XP will see the 2nd partition on your 320 and allow you to put your filles/data. NOTE: when you boot to vista, vista will be drive C:, when you boot to XP - XP will be drive C - SO the first ime after reintalling the 80 gig drive, verify your drive letters, and first time you boot to XP, recheck!

corrected spellling and added additional notes.

I think if the programs were originally installed using XP, they won't run from Vista and vice-versa. Something to do with dll's, drivers, file referencing etc. You'll be able to see all the files but I'd be surprised if you can run them.

I've been using Vista since the first public beta and have had no problems except a dirt cheap webcam which was awful to get working under XP and just didn't work in Vista!

How to check system health:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] eport.html


Using the Reliability Monitor:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] nitor.html

How to check/repair System Files: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] mmand.html

If needed, how to repair a Vista installation:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] vista.html

Vista will be able to see the data on the existing drive, and you will be able to access pictures/files and the like. It will NOT be able to run any programs from there, so you will have to install those within Vista.

As for the Dual Boot - I prefer using a Function key (F8 on most systems) on startup to choose OS. Just cleaner and less likely to suffer cross-pollination. Unplug the old HDD. Install on the new. Plug the old back in. Verify Drive letters.

But Quake 1(well winquake) works that way i had to. Reinstall your software so all the DLL and reg entries are on vista or most of it will just error out.

its really complicated when you're torn between vista and xp. i recently switched to vista to try out dx10 but then my WMP wont play mp3 using all the 6 channels i have (tried searching - no avail).so i cursed vista countless of times on countless of message boards and so i switch back to xp to only realize that my cod4 pings went twice the numbers i get when im on vista (pretty weird, im getting sub 30 on vista, even when im downloading something and 50-100 in xp when my system aint doing anything at all - fresh install no virus/spyware in the background i suppose).

what i did (just now, as in now) was to have these OS's co-exist.

For your sound, what card?

Creatives drivers and software are not good, but there is a modded version of creatives old software to give you CMMS(2) that will give you 6 channel sound(from 2 channel mp3's) if your card is from creative(Audigy and Audigy2, Xfi should work on its own).