Dual boot: windows OS selector vs. bios

[DanInPhilly]

I've researched this and I'm still confused ..

My new build will have two hard drives, XP on one and Vista64 on the other. My plan was to set bios to start on the vista64 disk. On those occasions where I want XP then I'll change the bios to start the other disk.

Q1) Is there a simpler way, maybe a simple "select" choice during bios startup? (if so it's not mentioned in the manual, gigabyte ga-p35-ds3l)

Anyway, I read in this thread
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1786000,00.asp
about something in Windows called OS Selector. You can use it to easily change the boot OS.

Q2) Would this work with my setup? It sounds easy to use.

I guess I'm worried that the windows os selector would conflict with the bios.

TIA.

 

[nukemaster]

Any kind of bios select would only work to change the boot device. This should work with multiple hard drives, but not multiple partitions on one hard drive....

So long as you have the partitions and are familiar with it. The MS one will work....There are other onces out there too.

Google bootloaders and you will find lots of stuff. but be away...if you make a mistake you can make your system unbootable(or hard to fix)

 

[onestar]

The OS selector is all software based, and is completely separate from hardware bios. This means there will be no conflict between the two.

You can choose which hard drive to boot from in the bios and this is a simple way to choose what OS will boot as long as you have two physical hard drives. The OS software selector will allow a boot from different partitions on the same drive and would be your best bet if that is your case.

 

[DanInPhilly]

Thanks you two. IF os selector requires both os on the same disk, then I'll
a) install xp first into an 80 gb partition
b) then install vista into the remaining 240 gb (it becomes C: )
That leaves the other disk for data only.

My original plan (put one OS one each hard drive) was in case one disk went bad, I could still use the other in the meantime. But having both OS on one disk isn't so bad; I guess I can make recovery disks for both (or maybe "ghost" the whole drive).