Ihave windows xp sp2 installed on my dell computer, I would like to install windows vista on a seperate drive and have the option to choose which system to use at startup. Is this possible? Is it as easy as just installing a new drive and then installing windows vista. Thanks for any help.
What is a bare "metal install"> I plan on installing vista on a brand new HDD, but iwas going to leave the drive that has XP as is. Is this correct.
Here's where you should have gone first. http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/8572be9b-8580-49f7-9719-b3a4c42749fe1033.mspx
Traditionally people put 2 partitions, an OS on each, on 1 hard drive and you could have a choice at the startup screen which to choose. If doing that you must do it Daliun's way. Vista first then XP. Dual booting from different drives is easy. You just have to select the vista drive in BIOS to make it your boot device. using a totally different drive you simply install anything on whatever drive you choose. It is a bigger pain this way, always going into the BIOS at startup and picking the drive(OS) you want to boot with but thats the trade off for not messing up your bootloader with a bunch of different options then having to manually repair your master boot record if you ever deleted one of the OS's installed.
I wholeheartedy agree with Deadrum as to the alternate method. I always recommend the "classic" method as safer.
Thank you for your help. It is pain to go into bios and change the drive to boot from, but it is tempoary until i get comfortable that vista can run all the programs that i am currently using on XP. Just wanted to make sure i could go back to XP if needed then i will just use it as a slave drive. I will be installing today.
Let us know how you get on. Would be happy to help with unexpected problems. F.Y.I---I have windows XP pro on a normal 80GB hard drive for main duty. I also have Win7 RC on a 30GB internal flash drive (solid state disc) for fun and experimenting. for data I use an added Raid card with 1TB (3x 500GB in RAID5) storage that can be accessed from whichever OS i decide to use that day.
I installed vista yesterday and everything worked perfect. Here is what i did if anyone wants to do what i did. I put in a new HDD and set them both to "cable select" put my vista dvd in and booted up, it asked me which drive i wanted to install vista in, i chose my new drive it formated the drive and installed vista. Now when i boot up my computer it askes me which operating system i want use "XP or Vista" it is working exactly as i wanted it to. If you don't make a choice within 15 seconds it defaults to Vista and boots up. When your in vista the XP drive is visible so you can transfer files. I have tried changing OS several times and they both work great.
