Dual boot concerns

Good Day!
Anyone can help me regarding dual boot. My os is win xp sp3 then i want to have another OS like vista home/ultimate. I already partition my hard disk.Whats the next step Il do.? your help is highly appreciated. tnks

 

i have vista home 32 ,i already experienced when i installed the vista in my second partition my previous OS is win xp sp3 is gone and all my files was lost. vista overwrite all. any idea on how to duol boot xp to vista?

 

Well, one good thing about Vista, is that you can resize partitions, and don't need a utility to do this, but basically, if you *can* get into Vista, then go to 'Start' , then rite clik on 'Computer', then lft clik on 'Manage" and that should show you the different partitions you already have, and if Vista is the OS that boots up, it will show 'it's' partition as being 'active'.

If there are other partitions, Vista will show them, and then you can clik on them, and look around, and make sure that XP really was removed, and not just 'inactive'...

If there is only the *one* partion, the one containing Vista, then you can rite clik on it, and it will show you how to 'shrink' the partition, and once that's done, you have to make the new partition primary/NTFS, all that, *then* what I did, was before I reboot, is make sure the partion I want to load XP on is *active*, rather than the Vista partition...

Anyway, mostly just get onto Vista, go Rite clik on 'Computer, and look around before you do anything else, and I know me, I kind of have to think it thru before I do *anything* as I too have hosed and lost expensive OS's....

Best wishes....

 

Also, after looking around in 'manage' and seeing what you are up against, an *excellent* little utility for duel-booting Vista, is VistaBootPro, and it does everything it sounds like you are attempting to do:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/VistaBootPRO_d5625.html

good luck, this can be really frustrating...I never had any problems dual-booting w/linux and XP, but Vista and XP can be 'tricky...'

 

tnks duckfeet for your help. any other procedure on how to dual boot xp and vista

 

Man, I *hate* to admit this, but I got stuck too: I can set either partition as "active" and then either xp or vista will boot right up, but when I try to set it up as a dual-boot, using vistabootpro, xp comes *up*, but I'm doing something wrong, because if I click on xp, it just starts rebooting again, going thru bios, all that... If I pick Vista, then it works fine...

So I spoke to soon, sorry, hopefully someone else will come along who knows more than I did. I never had this problem w/linux and xp, just now...and I've been reading everything, and as much time as I've put into this, I think I could've just learned to edit my boot file...I thought I had it down, but...nope

Oh well, back to lurking, and keeping an eye on this thread...I'm searching all over for more info: like I said, I've got'em both loaded fine, just xp won't work so far, in "dual boot" ...resizing partitions works great in Vista...

Good luck, and best wishes...

df

 

Is it possible my vista home 32 is pre-installed by my ecs laptop it is free when i bought this one. then this vista has no bootloader based what i observed it will directly installed not like vista ultimate you can choose where to setup i mean the partition can be seen, in my case the primary and secondary partition cannot coz my vista home have no options. So i can dual boot my win xp sp3 and vista home 32 or not?

 

Ahh, that's the ideal setup. Next is to install Vista on the empty partition and Vista will create a boot screen giving you a choice of Vista or XP. It's very easy when XP is on first.

 

I myself tried this one. Vista worked ok, then xp would never boot up. Getting vista and xp to dual boot seems like a hit and miss. It may work on some computers just fine, others it fails.

I go so frustrated trying to dual boot xp and vista I took vista out and gave up on it. Why microsoft never saw this issue comming is beyond me.

If you do give this a shot. Make sure all your important data is backed up. Seen countless issues with dual booting vista and xp and one or the other os not booting. Just be careful, back every thing up just in case. Hope it works out for ya.

 

Yep: I never even worried about it, since I hadn't any problems w/xp. I was searching other threads--some of which said to get the app, vistabootpro, but that hasn't helped, and I went to *their* site, and saw all kinds of threads w/the same problem, even using the app...

And of course, when I *checked* by vista boot file, it looked exactly like the guy had posted, so I'm beginning to think that what I read in another post, might be correct, that Vista just is a bully, and don't want no stinking lowlife operating system on the same hard drive with it :-D

But anyway, the hell w/apps, that wasted another day: I'm bound and determined to get back into linux thinking, and figure out the damn boot files like I should've in the first place....

...and I did load Vista second, sharing a hd w/previously installed xp, and can boot *either* one perfectly, as long as I go to disk manage and set'em as "active."

But dual boot, I still get same problem, where xp won't boot, and if I set xp as "active" it doesn't recognize vista....

sulk sulk