okay, so I want to make my comp a dual boot with xp and vista; vista already being installed. I know with vista already installed this is harder and why; MBR has to be fixed after installing xp. I had a crazy idea though of maybe getting around this, but I'm not sure it would work. The crazy idea being: 1. Disconnect my hdd with vista on it from my comp (one hard drive will have vista the other xp) 2. install xp on the second hard drive 3. reconnect vista hard drive 4. make vista hard drive first boot priority The thinking being there is no possible way the vista mbr could be affected while it is disconnected and with it as the first boot priority it would work just like as if I had installed xp with it still connected then repaired it. hopefully that made some sense. opinions? thoughts? could it work?
I am nearly certain that you can change the BIOS on your computer to determine which drive it's booting from. Then you can do as you said, and install XP on a second drive, and then change which one you're booting from by changing the bios settings at boot. However, it's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass, because you have to partially boot to get to the BIOS, save the changes, and then reboot with the new settings. I did a quick Google search using "dual boot vista" and several different sets of instructions came up on "how to dual boot with Vista installed first" so you might check some of those articles out and see if they help.
yeah, I did and I can do it the way they suggest, but it would require fixing the mbr after installing xp if I leave the vista drive connected. I was just wondering if my shortcut would work or screw things up.
It may affect the XP install where the boot.ini file and other settings reference the ARC path: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) which may change if it's moved as a secondary drive. If you have a genuine Vista disc which I believe you can break out to a command prompt, (or something like UBCD4Win) you may be able to "repair" the replaced XP boot code with the Vista boot code (bootsect I believe is the required command), and then get Vista to regenerate it's boot menu using bcdedit or EasyBCD. Here's some info about repair the Vista boot loader: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/how-to-repair-the-windows-vista-bootloader/ EDIT: It looks like genuine Vista DVDs also have a "startup repair" option which should figure things out for you as far as fixing the busted Vista boot loader.
