Dual Boot XP Pro/Vista Business

[munruss]

At home, I am running XP Pro on my primary drive. On the same drive, I want to create another primary drive. How do I correctly setup a dual boot with both operating systems?

 

[jamesbond007]

You can only have one primary/master/bootable drive. In your setup, you will simply partition the harddisk that WinXP is on and allocate a specified amount of space to it. Say you have a 160GB disk and allocated 100GB for Vista and 60GB for XP. After that, during the Vista setup, just do a clean install on the "D" partition or whatever letter your partition refers to and put Vista on there. A boot menu should appear when your computer starts up after the installation of Vista.

 

[munruss]

Thank you. I just created a new primary drive on the same hard drive where I have XP installed. I assigned the letter 'V.' I'll do an install to the V: drive and play with it there.

Now, if I wanted to use MS Office, do I have to reinstall it on the V: drive? I can't use Office where I have XP installed, right?

 

[jamesbond007]

Originally posted by: munruss
Thank you. I just created a new primary drive on the same hard drive where I have XP installed. I assigned the letter 'V.' I'll do an install to the V: drive and play with it there.

Now, if I wanted to use MS Office, do I have to reinstall it on the V: drive? I can't use Office where I have XP installed, right?

That's correct. Think of the two Windows installs as completely independent from each other in terms of application sharing. Casual file sharing (like pictures, Word documents, etc) is OK since they do not rely on specific operating system resources, unless the folder is encrypted or has protected access.

I'm not sure what version of Office you're referring to, but you may want to make sure that having it installed on both Windows installs is OK and that activating it again on another operating system won't violate your EULA.