As to dual-booting Vista and XP, I strongly suggest that, if your
motherboard BIOS supports the displaying a menu of bootable devices when
you turn your PC on, that you take that option, rather than relying on
the Vista Boot Manager (either through BCDEdit or a 3rd party program
like Vista Boot Pro). For example, during the Power on Self Test (POST),
most recent vintage Asus motherboards will display this menu if you
hit the F8 key. You have to hit F8 before you get the Windows splash
screen. Of course, each OS has to be on its own physical drive (not on
multiple partitions on a single hard drive) for the BIOS Boot Selection
(or unfortunately BBS, as Asus calls it) option to make any sense.
The Vista Boot Manager is highly unreliable and can easily mess up both
the Vista and the XP installations to the point where one or both will
need to be reinstalled. Don't say that someone didn't warn you. The VBM
ranks right up there with UAC as one of the "good idea/bad
implementation" features of Vista.
BTW, I think Vista Boot Pro is a really nice piece of software, but it
still relies on the Vista Boot Manager, the behavior of which borders on
being a virus.
....winston wrote:
> If you haven't changed the name of XP(which shows up as an earlier operating system) with Vista's built in boot editor consider using VistaBootPro or BootItNG.
> http://www.vistabootpro.org/
> http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
>
> The former is simpler, but the latter has many more options.
>
> ..winston
>
> "Paul T" <pmt1209@hotmail.com> wrote in message news
05D2A10-7BE2-4C36-810E-549B5AE6853F@microsoft.com...
> : Used XP to format my new 2nd HD before installing Vista Prem. and all went
> : smoothly..
> :
> : "Vusta" <vusta@msnews.grp> wrote in message
> : news:uullL1ydHHA.2088@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> : >
> : > Hello Newsgroup,
> : >
> : > Not really a question about dual booting, more on the lines of reading
> : > disc
> : > formats. I have one physical disc that will be my system disc. This will
> : > be
> : > partitioned with XP Pro SP2, and Vista Ultimate. So far all is well.
> : >
> : > I have a 250 GB SATA II disc which will serve as my data disc, Documents,
> : > Music, Videos, Pictures, Databases,.... I wish to use the whole disc for
> : > both partitions, as the data disc.
> : >
> : > My question being, will WinXP Pro SP2 properly read the data disc if, I
> : > use
> : > WinVista Ultimate to format the disc, and redirect all (data, and temp)
> : > folders to the disc? And redirect equivalent folders in XP Pro SP2 to
> : > point
> : > to those folders too? I know it will work the other way around.
> : >
> : > If not, I have a separate data disc for each OS.
> : >
> : > Thank you very much Newsgroup.
> : >
> : > Regards,
> : > Vusta
> : > (It's my name, and I'm not from New Zealand saying Vista!)
> : >
> : >
> :