Tom's Hardware > Forum > Graphic & Displays > Graphics Cards > boot help for vista/xp(i know i'm in the wrong place)

boot help for vista/xp(i know i'm in the wrong place)

Forum Graphic & Displays : Graphics Cards - boot help for vista/xp(i know i'm in the wrong place)

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laytons   04-19-2007 at 10:22:20 PM

this is the wrong place but i find that the best help is here.
so i was wondering if i could boot vista and xp off different drives.even if one was ide ata100 and one was sata 3gb/s

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The_Abyss   04-19-2007 at 10:28:56 PM
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Either wait for the R600 or buy an 8800GTX today.

Yes, you're in the wrong place.

I believe you require an physical switch between the hdds to do what you want - IDE and SATA makes no difference.

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laytons   04-19-2007 at 10:30:39 PM
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what do you mean by physical switch.

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The_Abyss   04-19-2007 at 10:32:16 PM
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I recall someone posted before in a correct forum and website a simple switch he made to turn power on and off between the 2 drives.

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laytons   04-19-2007 at 10:37:01 PM
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but can i use both drives for storage

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logical2u   04-19-2007 at 10:37:04 PM
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Yes, you can dual boot from different hard drives.

Yes, it is semi-difficult to get Vista to install to a different drive if you don't know what you're doing.

Vista will complain (loudly) on an older hard drive, and it'll make your anti-virus programs take much longer to complete.

You can even dual boot between X32 and X64 OSes.

A physical switch will keep random data transfer from occurring, but it is handy to keep both OS's files accessable from one or the other.

For the record, I dual boot Win-XP x32 Home SP2 and Win-Vista-Ult x64 on my system, from two separate partitions on a 250 GB SATA. So I can't see why two different drives wouldn't work.

EDIT: If you install a "switch", no. It physically turns off the power to one hard drive or the other depending on how the switch is set up.

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laytons   04-19-2007 at 10:38:17 PM
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thanks and I'll be using a faster drive for vista

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4745454b   04-19-2007 at 11:05:14 PM
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What is it in vista that causes this to happen? I don't see why you wouldn't just throw XP on one drive, Vista on another, then select the boot drive in the bios. Modern motherboards will let you chose what drive to boot from.

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djcoolmasterx   04-19-2007 at 11:21:27 PM
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I run vista and xp in dual boot, it was really easy, all I had to do was put in the vista install disc while in xp and select the option to install it to a different location, my second hard drive (an old 20gb 5400rpm).

When it boots it will display an options screen, either windows vista or an earlier version of windows (xp). It will by default automatically boot vista if you do not make a selection after 30 seconds.

In vista you can go into system properties, advanced, startup and recovery then select the operating system you want as default and length of time to automatically boot.

This has worked for me brilliantly but both hard drives are IDE so im not sure about SATA but it should be the same.

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