Dual Booting Win XP SP2 & Vista RC1 on 2 Hard Drives

kevin551 said:
Hi again

Yes it works. Am now dual booting two drives from vista without any alterations to the first.

The solution to jwalkin's problem seems to be the boot.ini

When I boot from vista I boot to rdisk(1) to get to win2k3
When I boot from win2k3 I boot to rdisk(0) to get to win2k3

I have both options in boot.ini
I am going to set up the former as default and always boot from vista. for the next 30 days anyway. Then I can easily swap back to the original.

Interestingly I have two additional options in my boot.ini, recovery console and bartpe.
These now both appear in the vista bootloader and then again in the boot.ini screen.
Given that these are both repair functions for my win2k3 disk I see no reason to check whether they actually work from vista. Just thought people might be curious.

So thanks for the help. And easyBCD worked well.

Kevin
Click to expand...
Hi Kevin

I have the same situation as you have. I have two drives with standalone installations of Vista and XP. I swap between them changing boot priority in bios.
Drive 1, partition 1 - Vista
Drive 2, partition 1 - WinXP
I have installed EasyBCD in Vista and added new entry WinXP pointing to drive 2, but when select WinXP from boot menu it takes me again to boot menu without starting WinPX.
Could you explain step by step what you did to have succses with dual booting, please. Thnx
Roman
 
Hi athl1981, welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

I'm afraid that in versions of Vista after RC1, this feature has been crippled. If you get the "incorrect driver signature" you need to hit "F8" before you boot into it, and choose to "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement" in order for it to boot.

The best way to dual-boot Legacy Windows + Vista to use EasyBCD to create a 2k3 entry, then modify your boot.ini to point to the correct 2k3 partition/drive.

If you're still having issues or want to discuss this further, please open a new thread.
 
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