OK to dual-boot by switching boot drives with BIOS?

I have two physical hard drives, with a Windows XP installation and
applications on C:. I cleaned out the D: drive and reformatted it. Then I
set it to be the first HD boot drive using the my computer's BIOS setup
routine. Vista Beta 2 installed very nicely to the D: drive (which became C:
as the new boot drive)

I use the BIOS setup to switch boot drives. Now I'm having some glitches
running Vista. My question is: Could the way I installed Vista and switch
boot drives be causing any problems? Or when I make the old D: drive the C:
drive and boot up Vista, does the old C: drive (with Windows XP -- now the D:
drive) just look like a disk full of data to Vista?

If I screwed up, what's the best way to dual-boot XP and the Vista Beta?

The best way is to use the boot loader that comes with Vista (although...what
is wrong with NTLoader, Microsoft?). It gets installed automatically.
It may have happened that WinXP did something to the then D: drive that
makes Vista not boot any longer.
Assuming that you do not want to use the bootloader for a particular reason,
you should not only change the boot drive in the BIOS, but disable the other
HDD entirely, so that XP cannot access the Vista drive and vice versa.

Pirate Pete ha scritto:

> If I screwed up, what's the best way to dual-boot XP and the Vista Beta?

XP on disc 0
Vista on disc 1

Setting BIOS to boot from disc 0 will load XP exclusively
setting BIOS to boot from disc 1 will give you the opportunity to select
Vista or "older Windows"

You may also try to keep the BIOS booting from disc 0, and keep the
Vista-DVD in the drive, and then selecting DVD-ROM as first choice in
BIOS boot settings. Due to a strange bug, this will let you select what
operating system to boot even if the firse hard disk il disc 0. Or, this
is what's happening to my machine.

p.bes