XP AND VISTA DUAL BOOT - 3rd Party Serials Lost????//

[little_emmynem]

I have windows xp installed on my PC and my other physical drive D: has 40.00 GB freespace,,

I want to install Windows Vista on it but will the registered informatin about softwares installed on my PC erase (Example - I have a business software which dad uses and it requires password each time PC is formatted and they charge money for new serial) . If I install VISTA without harming XP, i.e. by installing it in other drive will all the registered serials be lost when I use XP for work and vista for entertainment?

 

[KSoD]

No. Nothing will be lost if you install Vista on a seperate hard drive. Which you should do anyways. You never want to have 2 seperate windows install on on the same ahrd drive or partition.

XP will act just like it does. Vista will have to get the software installed and you will need your serials to isntall it.

 

[little_emmynem]

r u sure about this???
bcoz its a risky job for me lol

 

[Nick]

as long as you dont touch the drive which has XP on it, like format it or do anything to it JUST DONT TOUCH IT!!!, installing vista on another hard drive will have no effect on the XP installation

 

[DaMadScientist]

too avoid complications, never dual boot on the same harddrive

 

[Nick]

i tried to dual booot vista and linux on the same drive, it completely corrupted my vista partition and wouldn't let install vista, had to download g-parted format and all that crap

 

[KSoD]

r u sure about this???
bcoz its a risky job for me lol

Yes i am sure of this cause i dual boot XP and Vista. I had XP installed first and then installed Vista. My XP install id jsut fine and operates just like it did before.

 

[DaMadScientist]

the thing with dual booting Vista and XP is, you have to use the Vista Boot Manager, and the simple days of editing the boot.ini files are over, its a completely different thing. I was the few of the first to dual boot Vista Beta and XP before any applications were available and let me tell you it was a nightmare, you had to move this file here and this file there, and then Vista took a crap and didnt let me boot into anything, but luckily i dualbooted with 2 harddrives so i just had to reformat Vista

 

[KSoD]

Google for EasyBCD. It allows you to edit the BCD with ease.

 

[EricB]

the thing with dual booting Vista and XP is, you have to use the Vista Boot Manager, and the simple days of editing the boot.ini files are over, its a completely different thing. I was the few of the first to dual boot Vista Beta and XP before any applications were available and let me tell you it was a nightmare, you had to move this file here and this file there, and then Vista took a crap and didnt let me boot into anything, but luckily i dualbooted with 2 harddrives so i just had to reformat Vista

if you would have disconnected the xp drive, while installing vista you could done away with the boot loader. just set which hard drive to boot from the bios or through f12.

that's my setup.