Installing Vista

[Shadow Conception]

Well, I just downloaded Vista Pre-RC1, but I've no idea how to create a new partition to put it on without overwriting my XP partition. Any way to do this?

 

[Nick5324]

If you don't already have some "unused" space (NOT free space, but space that is not part of your system partition) on your drive, your best bet is to use a 3rd party app like Partion Magic to partition your drive.

 

[Shadow Conception]

Alright, never mind. I just found an unused 80GB HDD in one of my other computers. I formatted it, and here's my situation:

Okay, here, I just got a new 80GB HDD, and hooked it up to my Dimension 3000 as a slave drive, and I also have here a copy of Vista RC1. One thing comes to mind: installing Vista on this new hard drive. I don't want to overwrite my XP installation on my C: drive, but I do want to install Vista on the new HDD ( F: ), but how do I do that? Specifically, how do I install Vista on my F: drive without unplugging my C: drive? And after installing, how do I choose which OS I want to load? In other words, how do I dual-boot?

 

[Spyvie]

Back up your files first!

Just install the drive, make sure its working (you can see it in XP) then boot from the Vista disk and do a custom install (the only option you will get if you boot from the DVD) Vista setup will give you a chance to choose what disk to install to and delete/create partitions.

When setup is done, you will have a new boot manager thats lets you select Vista or XP

 

[Shadow Conception]

Yeah, that's kinda what I did 😛

I ended up going into Control Panel > Administrative Options > Disk Management, and making a 15GB partition specifically for Vista. Installing it right now, hope it works 🙂

 

[Underclocked]

Advise you to go get the download from http://www.vistabootpro.org/ .

Works great for when you decide to remove the Vista boot loader.

 

[Shadow Conception]

Well, after a few hours of tantrums, troubleshooting, partitioning, and corrupted files, I finally was able to successfully install Windows Vista Pre-RC1 on my newly found HDD yesterday, and am now able to dual-boot between XP Home and Vista. This is pretty awesome, it's just a shame that my video card doesn't support AERO 🙁

But, wow, Vista is much faster than I imagined. With a P4 3GHz Processor, 1.25GB RAM, and a 256MB ATI Radeon 9250, Vista is actually fast, not the resource hog I've been hearing repeatedly from Beta testers. But, yeah, this is cool. In my opinion, Microsoft is heading in the right direction with this OS.