Rock

"niknik1971" wrote

>I have just install visa onto my old computer and I am thinking of putting
>it on my new computer.
> I have xp pro on my C: drive and I was thinking of putting vista on my D:
> drive.
> If when the beta period runs out, or if it (vista) does not like my
> hardware/ software and is unusable could I not just boot into xp delete
> all the vista files on the D: drive and edit the boot.ini file?
>
> If vista is installed on the D: drive what gets added to the C: drive?

What you are asking about is a standard dual boot scenario. Vista installs
it's own boot loader files in the first active primary partition which is
probably the C drive in your system. The Vista boot loader takes over.
When the computer is booted a menu comes up from the Vista boot loader
giving you a choice of the Vista installation or legacy installations (XP).
If you choose legacy, then the XP boot loader is displayed or it boots right
into XP depending on how your system is set up.

Removing the Vista installation involves removing the Vista partition and
running some commands from XP's recovery console to remove the Vista boot
loader and restore XP's. There are some new 3rd party tools such as
VistaBootPro that can do this as well.

As a word of caution. Vista should only be installed on a test system,
never on a production machine or a primary home computer. You should have
some means for restoring the system to it's current condition (the XP
installation) in case something goes wrong during the install.

Do some research first by reading the posts in this newsgroup that deal with
dual boot situations.

--

Rock [ MVP User/Shell]