Hi folks,
First time poster - so be gentle
I built a new PC a few months back and decided to take the big leap and go for Vista (all new components, so wasn't many problems with drivers). After 6 months of Vista 64-bit I have decided that it just not quite ready - no iPod recognition on 64-bit systems and a general concern over the performance of games being the main issues.
So I decided it was time to dual boot the PC and have XP on hand when I feel Vistas just not cutting it.
And so to my story of woe...
I bought a another HDD to keep the 2 OSs completely apart and then followed the guides for installing XP with Vista already installed. Unfortunately I can't get XP to complete the installation process. It keeps BSOD at exactly the same point every time I try - when the installation process reboots for the first time and starts to load XP (gets to the blue "Windows loading" screen). After numerous attempts I gave up and used the Vista CD to recover the Vista MBR. EasyBCD appears to be set up fine in Vista and I have it set up to dual boot, but its a pointless exercise as the XP installation will never complete. This was all before Christmas. I gave up assuming I had a hardware issue that XP was encountering and that it probably wasn't worth trying to fix it in case I ruined the Vista install.
Anyway, I decided to have another crack at it yesterday. In order to discover what was wrong with the XP install, I disconnected every HDD apart from the one XP is going on and tried a clean XP install. I worked with no problems! So obvious the XP installation isn't an issue.
And now to the point of the post...
I'm beginning to wonder if my heavily partitioned drives might be the issue. 3 x 320Gb drives.
1st has 4 partitions (inc a hidden Acronis Secure Zone), with Vista as primary
2nd has 3 partitions (games, data and application backups)
3rd has 2 partitions, with the first one intended for XP.
Is my XP install issue because I have tried to put it on the first partition and the system is renaming them when the install reboots? Should change to the last partition and force it to be called Z (using Acronis Disk Director)?
Final question, I now have a workable Vista and XP installations, but can't boot up with both connect as there will presumably be two MBRs. Is there any way of booting up and using EasyBCD to modify one of the MBRs without having to go through the pain of having to re-install one of the OSs?
Sorry for rambling on and thanks in advance for any replies
Cheers
Algie
First time poster - so be gentle
I built a new PC a few months back and decided to take the big leap and go for Vista (all new components, so wasn't many problems with drivers). After 6 months of Vista 64-bit I have decided that it just not quite ready - no iPod recognition on 64-bit systems and a general concern over the performance of games being the main issues.
So I decided it was time to dual boot the PC and have XP on hand when I feel Vistas just not cutting it.
And so to my story of woe...
I bought a another HDD to keep the 2 OSs completely apart and then followed the guides for installing XP with Vista already installed. Unfortunately I can't get XP to complete the installation process. It keeps BSOD at exactly the same point every time I try - when the installation process reboots for the first time and starts to load XP (gets to the blue "Windows loading" screen). After numerous attempts I gave up and used the Vista CD to recover the Vista MBR. EasyBCD appears to be set up fine in Vista and I have it set up to dual boot, but its a pointless exercise as the XP installation will never complete. This was all before Christmas. I gave up assuming I had a hardware issue that XP was encountering and that it probably wasn't worth trying to fix it in case I ruined the Vista install.
Anyway, I decided to have another crack at it yesterday. In order to discover what was wrong with the XP install, I disconnected every HDD apart from the one XP is going on and tried a clean XP install. I worked with no problems! So obvious the XP installation isn't an issue.
And now to the point of the post...
I'm beginning to wonder if my heavily partitioned drives might be the issue. 3 x 320Gb drives.
1st has 4 partitions (inc a hidden Acronis Secure Zone), with Vista as primary
2nd has 3 partitions (games, data and application backups)
3rd has 2 partitions, with the first one intended for XP.
Is my XP install issue because I have tried to put it on the first partition and the system is renaming them when the install reboots? Should change to the last partition and force it to be called Z (using Acronis Disk Director)?
Final question, I now have a workable Vista and XP installations, but can't boot up with both connect as there will presumably be two MBRs. Is there any way of booting up and using EasyBCD to modify one of the MBRs without having to go through the pain of having to re-install one of the OSs?
Sorry for rambling on and thanks in advance for any replies
Cheers
Algie