Negative effects of dual booting

1. Vista is fine now

2. Find a tutorial on dual booting Vista and Ubuntu. Dual booting XP and Vista is easy - just install XP first and then Vista. For Ubuntu and Vista you may need to follow a certain procedure so that one of the OSes does not overwrite the boot cfg of the other.

3. Dual booting has no effect on the performance of either OS as both are ignorant of the existence of the other and neither runs at all while the other is running.

4. Your best bet would be to install Linux on one physical HD and Vista on another and then use your pop up BIOS boot menu to choose which to boot.

5. The worst thing about dual booting OSes on the same physical drive is that the ability to boot either depends on one boot config file which resides on one of the partitions. If it gets lost or corrupt you have to resort to repair alternatives to boot either os. If you put them on separate drives there is no boot config file and if one drive should die you will always be able to boot the other.

... except for differences in disk transfer rates. This is mainly an issue where both installations are on one spindle: one OS will reside in a much faster region of the disk than the other OS - disk performance falls off very quickly across the cylinders of a spindle. in the case where the 2nd installation is fakeunix (e.g. Linux), however, this isn't much concern as the disk demands of *X are generally much lower than windows.

True. Another good reason to use two physical drives.

You shouldn't have any problems with Ubuntu being your second booting OP/SYS.

WinXP however does create dual booting problems with Vista of any flavor, WinXP will delete Vista Restore points whether its a 2 OP/SYS partitions on 1 HDD setup or 2 HDDs independently installed with each OP/SYS.

This is a known MSFT issue!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926185

Of which I just went through and learned the hard way!

Ubuntus file system and Vistas may be invisable to each other but WinXP and Vista can and do see each other, even in a dual HDD setup as I had at the time, when WinXP boots it acknowledges the second HDD, and if it finds the Shadow Copy file containing the Vista restore info, it will delete that data every time.

Since your intentions are to use Ubuntu you're OK, but if you consider WinXP you will have these problems.

Even though I dual boot WinXP Pro 32 and Vista Home Premium 64, I do not have that problem anymore of XP deleting the Vista restore points, there is a way around it that works to 100% perfection and that is to simply install a HDD switch, then WinXP really cannot see the Vista HDD because it isn't powered up.

4ryan6 did you try the registry fix supplied on that MS page? It supposedly makes the Vista volume invisible to XP - you can't even transfer files between the two while in XP, though you can while in Vista.

I had forgotten about this problem. I just checked my restore points and all I have are recent ones, from the last few days - I did boot up XP a few days ago, first time in a long time.

I'm going to try the registry fix.

notherdude I didn't try the fix, by the time I realized I had a problem and my restore points were gone, and SFC didn't help, and HDD error checking didn't help, I knew I was facing a reinstall of the OP/SYS.

I attempted the Vista Upgrade Repair as a last resort and thought it was going to work, but it got right to the end of the process, stopped, reported some error, and automatically started rolling my installed OP/SYS back. Bummer

It would be very helpful to know if the Fix works for you?

I hope you'll keep us informed?