Vista/XP separate windows.

[edozac]

My hard drive is partitioned, 150 MB for Vista; 50 MB for XP This was done for me by a local computer service office. To go from Vista to XP or vice versa is very time-consuming. I have to restart. shutting down one and booting the other. (Going to XP brings up a dialog box for a non-existent password which I have to click on to continue the boot. Annoying detail.)

I do not know what program, if any, was used to partition the hard drive, perhaps EasyBCD or something else the programmer had, possibly personal brain-power.

At any rate, with EasyBCD, can one have Vista open in one window and XP open in another, simply switching from one window to the other without having to shutdown and reboot?

 

[JustinW]

edozac, welcome to NST

With your current configuration, you cannot since each OS is physically installed on the hard drive rather than in a file. You can however use what is known as a virtual machine, where you run a "guest OS" within another OS (host OS). I'd recommend creating an XP VM inside Vista using something like Virtual PC from MS or vmware. I believe vmware has a vmware converter too that'll take a physical install and convert it to a virtual machine. Once you get this setup, you can use EasyBCD to remove XP's entry and reformat XP's partition for other purposes.

BTW, most hard drives are measured in GB today, not MB. Windows alone can easily take 5-10GB fresh off an install.