[jaffa-cakes]

can i install vista along side win xp if i use a partition of say 30 odd gig.
can i then dual boot and i get up an option to eather use win xp or vista.
o and the partition will be on a different hard drive from my win xp drive.
as i have 2 150 gig sata drives one for windowns and games and the other for storage.
any help would be great as i would like to see the new vista .

[Rasta Monsta]

Yes you can. The downside is that the Vista bootloader will take over, and will remain even after Vista is uninstalled.

rasta

[jaffa-cakes]

nuts thats not good then. as most of my game us xp. what is the story with vista any game support it yet?
so i dont think i will get vista if that is the case.

thanks for the help

[temeteus82]

Originally Posted by Rasta Monsta

The downside is that the Vista bootloader will take over, and will remain even after Vista is uninstalled.

rasta

Rasta, you have idea where Vista boot loader install's it self??

[Eck]

All you need to do to get rid of Vista's boot loader is boot to the XP cd's Recovery Console. F8 at bootup and press 1 for your Windows then type in the Administrator password if you made one or else just hit Enter. At the command prompt type FIXBOOT, okay it. Then you type FIXMBR and okay it, then for good measure when I did it I typed FIXBOOT again. Make sure that if you're on a SATA or Raid system you F6 to load the raid driver while the XP cd is booting up. It tells you when to F6 it on the bottom of the screen. You don't have much time so hold it down as soon as you see that. That way when XP puts its stuff back you get your raid or sata drives referenced correctly.

Your miliege may vary but I did this when I wanted to wipe my drives to install XP again. All the above does is put XP's boot loader back in charge (FIXMBR) and the FIXBOOT puts things back to XP's way instead of Vista assuming its partition is the C drive even though it's really the D drive. I then, for my purposes, used the Recovery Console to delete Vista's partition, then (again, for me since I was starting clean) deleted XP's partition.

Of course, you would just boot the computer after doing the FIXBOOT, FIXMBR, FIXBOOT. From XP's Disk Management delete the Vista partition. Done. You may want to check out boot.ini to see if any Vista lines are still in there and delete them.

A cleaner method without as much worry is using VistaBootPro. ProNetworks developes this and you install it to the Vista operating system and it edits bcdedit for you with a GUI. It's safer since your not guessing which partition your dealing with in the command prompt. I wasn't too afraid since I was deleting everything anyway so I didn't bother installing software. Just Recovery Consoled it and hoped for the best.

[H3X4D3C1M4L]

Originally Posted by temeteus82

Rasta, you have idea where Vista boot loader install's it self??

It replaces NTLDR in the MBR and creates a folder on the primary bootable partition called "Boot" (oddly enough ). And he's right, it takes over 100%. No more NTLDR.

[MGaunce]

The other way to remove Vista's boot manager is to boot from the Vista CD and run bootsect -nt52 -all. This is roughly equivalent to fixmbr except it is also Vista aware. For example to switch from XP boot (loading from ntldr) to Vista boot (booting from winload.exe) you would use bootsect -nt60 -all. Then use bcdedit to fill in partition info, default boot system, etc. The following link should give some illustration of how bcdedit works.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529/en-us

[temeteus82]

Originally Posted by H3X4D3C1M4L

It replaces NTLDR in the MBR and creates a folder on the primary bootable partition called "Boot" (oddly enough ). And he's right, it takes over 100%. No more NTLDR.

I see...
I now have Xp Pro x84, x64 and vista. so why I see the xp's boot menu? Are it loaded from that "boot" folder? ? ?

[MGaunce]

Originally Posted by temeteus82

I see...
I now have Xp Pro x84, x64 and vista. so why I see the xp's boot menu? Are it loaded from that "boot" folder? ? ?

The way it works is that with Vista installed, the system boots from the Boot Manager database and displays available boot options. If a legacy OS (XP) is present and selected, the boot manager hands off the boot process to ntldr and the boot.ini and an XP boot takes over at that point. It is not quite correct to say that ntldr is no longer present. On a system with XP it is there but only comes into play after the Vista Boot Manager hands off the boot process to XP. An important point to note...on a machine with Vista installed first and then XP, the boot.ini and also ntldr will be located in the root of the system partition. So even though you may install XP to a D: drive (for example) if Vista is installed on the C: drive, the path to the boot .ini and ntldr will be the root of C:, not D:.