Dual Boot XP and Vista

[jasonhtml]

hi, currently i have Vista Home Premium installed on 1 harddrive, and nothing on a second one. i want to install XP Home onto the second one, but im not sure how to go about doing it.

do i just insert the XP disc right now while Vista is running, or do i have to reboot and boot from the XP disc?

how does booting work? ive read that if you have 2 OSs on different partitions, it will automatically ask you which one to boot from, but i havent found anything about 2 HDDs except one post on another forum that didnt answer my questions correctly. it did say that you have to unplug/plugin each harddrive to use it if you have 1 PATA and 1 SATA, but i have 2 SATA, so i shouldnt need to do that.

can anyone make a quick walkthrough for doing this? im afraid that if i try it myself without asking for help i will do something that makes one of the OSs unbootable...

 

[jasonhtml]

anyone? id like to get this done by the end of today...

 

[EricB]

just install xp on the second drive

 

[jasonhtml]

ok, sounds easy enough... i thought i would have to do something so that the computer would recognize that there is an OS on both...

 

[EricB]

it will automatically edit the boot.ini for you. you would disconnect a drive if you truly wanted to separate them.

 

[jasonhtml]

ok, ill try it tomorrow since it is too late for me to install it now. hope it works out fine

 

[jasonhtml]

ok, well i installed XP and it didnt do as you said it would. the boot.ini wasnt automatically reconfigured and i had to insert the Vista DVD to repair Vista's booting. but, now i can only boot into Vista. so i tried changing Vista's boot settings, but XP doesnt show up on the list of operating systems...

 

[EricB]

I was going to tell you to repair vista after the xp install as the xp was going to clear the boot sector. this is why you should install xp first

now run the boot config for the xp repair to find it

 

[jasonhtml]

wait... run xp repair -or- boot config in vista?

btw, i already repaired vista, because i couldnt get it to boot. so its repaired now, but i cant get into XP

 

[EricB]

wait... run xp repair -or- boot config in vista?

btw, i already repaired vista, because i couldnt get it to boot. so its repaired now, but i cant get into XP

boot config in xp