Installed Vista on spare HD. no option for OS when i boot.

[dalearyous]

i have 2 WD raptor drives running normal wndows xp and all my day to day stuff. i have a spare 40gig HD that i installed windows vista. the only way to boot from vista is to stop into the bios on my DFI board and change the boot order for hard drives. i want the option to pick but not confident enough to mess around with boot.ini file. i know how to restore the file if i mess it up but would prefer to avoid that.

 

[ViRGE]

Actually Boot.ini wouldn't do you any good. You'd need to use BCDedit in Vista to edit the Vista boot loader, as that's the only Windows boot loader that can load Vista.

 

[postmortemIA]

no fix for you, if you change boot order you won't be able to boot to windows xp.

you shouldn't have changed boot order in first place.

 

[SingleAction]

I have a related question?

I bought a second sata hdd to load vista onto.

What I plan to do, is swap between the 2 drives( unplug,plug)using only one at a time to boot from. I don't want to somehow corrupt my XP install.

Is there anything I have to do to the cmos/bios settings when I swap back and forth,or will the bios just see either drive, and boot normally?

Also I downloaded both versions, the x-86 and x-64. So if the 64bit doesn't work I'll just use the 32bit version.

I plan to install the 64bit version on this system: Asus p5b, Conroe e6400, 2g ddr2-800mhz, gforce 7300gs 256mb.

I downloaded drivers from Asus site for XP x-64 os, will these work for Vista, or do you think that this os will have support built in considering that all this hardware is new and current?

BTW, Nvidia has a beta driver in both x-86, and x-64 versions that will work with my 7300gs.

 

[pkypkypky]

bump...

I have installed Vista on a separate drive and would like to know if I can have my boot manager give me an option of selecting which OS to boot instead of me going into my bios each time I want to play with Vista. Is this possible or do I need to install on same hdd?

 

[dfuze]

I installed XP on one drive and Vista RC2 32 bit on another without a problem. You don't need to go inside the machine and plug/unplug a drive to decide which one to use. The standard boot menu didn't stay up long for me to make a choice unless I stared at the screen, so to edit it, I used VistaBootPro and it allows you change the time the boot menu is up, the names of the systems in it, and which one is the default. Very easy to use program.

 

[pkypkypky]

I'm a bit confused now because just to get into Vista (this was only my second time booting it up) I had to switch my HDD priority in the bios. When Vista started up, my drives were all mixed up from their original XP order...

C drive = Vista
D drive = XP

While using XP,
C drive is XP
H drive is Vista

So is it safe to use that boot program ^above^ with the drives mixed up like this? Right now I'm worried XP will try to boot with the bootmanager and think it's the D drive and screw up my XP.

I wish I had room on my tiny raptor to put this on a single drive but I don't.