How to dual boot Vista and XP without allocating XP a drive letter?

Question

I have the following setup:

Set up in Vista as:
disk0#1 (windows xp) = not mapped
disk0#2 (data) = d:
disk1#1 (windows vista) = c:
disk1#2 (data) = e:

Set up in XP as:
disk0#1 (windows xp) = c:
disk0#2 (data) = d:
disk1#1 (windows vista) = not mapped
disk1#2 (data) = e:

Basically, I don't want the 'other' OS drive mapped (visible) in vista / xp's respective environment.

So what I want to do is to set Vista to dual boot on disk0#1 and disk1#1 - problem is all the apps I use such as Easy BCD will only let me boot onto this disk if I allocate it a drive letter. This was easy in XP since boot.ini let you choose your boot devices based on disk#partition#. So right now I am having to use the BIOS boot selection to determine which drive boots up.

Note, I cannot set the XP disk as the primary and dual boot to vista from that since the BIOS won't let me (RAID controller issue) so it HAS to be a Vista BCD boot based solution.

Thanks in advance
Matt

Answer 1

Hello,

I've tried to do that as well and I've never been successful with it using the Windows boot manager. Windows bootloader reads the configuration you have in your BIOS and goes from there. The new Vista boot is completely different from the way XP boots. and when you install Vista after XP, it overwrites your MBR and you pretty much can't use the XP bootloader anymore.



I HAVE succeeded using GRUB though (If you're not familiar with it, it's the Linux bootloader). You can still boot windows, but you can change the order of drives. For every single entry you can have you can have something looking like this:



title Microsoft Windows XP Pro

root (hd1,0)

map (hd1) (hd0)

map (hd0) (hd1)

hide (hd0,1) ->hides disk 1, partition 1

makeactive

(The original hd0, hd1, hd2... order is set by your bios boot order, and grub changes it for the operating system, so that it's reported in the order you want it to be)



This way you are telling the windows loader which disk is main before a letter is allocated. (another thing you have to do is copy the vista boot folder and boot.ini to the appropriate disk)

After configuring, whatever operating system you log onto will have their main partition on the main drive marked as C: .

Then you can get something like partition magic and just click "Hide" or "Set inactive" on the partitions you don't want to see (I know for a fact that XP Disk Management can't do it, it can only re-assign letters, but the vista program might be able to do it).



I use this configuration on my PC and when I installed grub on my GF's PC, it easily detected all OS installation and did the boot configuration by itself (It made the XP, Vista and the Sony restore boot selections by itself).



An issue you might have is if one of your operating systems boots itself from a drive labeled D: ... then you will either have to reinstall it after you reconfigure the drives, or just keep using it from there and make C: hidden (inactive) (make sure you copy all the boot information before hiding it).



P.S. Don't even bother with BCD and Vista boot pro and so on, they work great for editing the vista boot menu, but nothing more, they give you no control over the drives or load order...

Answer 2

While Vista can upgrade your current version of XP, you may wish to try a dual-boot configuration. This leaves your XP installation alone and installs Vista in another partition, either an existing one or one you will create just for Vista. Now Vista comes with it's own partitioning tools that can be accessed during setup as run from the Vista bootable DVD. You will need a good sized partition, at least 15GB or more, depending on how many programs you will install in Vista later.



Once you have your partition, you can install Vista in one of 2 ways: either start the install from within XP (telling Vista to not perform an upgrade) or you can boot with the Vista DVD, making sure that your BIOS is configured to boot your DVD drive before the hard drive. I prefer to boot from the DVD.



Vista's installation program is fairly straightforward, and if you have installed XP from scratch before, Vista's initial setup screens will be quite familiar. You are presented with a list of partitions to chose from, and once you choose the partition, if you would like to format it or not.



Once Vista is installed, you will notice a boring black & white text screen that presents itself when the PC is restarted. This is Vista's boot manager. You have about 30 seconds to choose between "Earlier version of Windows" (that would be XP) and "Microsoft Windows" (that would be Vista)

Answer 3

i would think it would bite you having two operating systems on one pc