Dual Boot - 2 Hard Drives

I currently have Vista installed on my machine and was thinking of installing windows XP as well. I recently put in my old hard drive from my old computer. Can i run through the Windows XP setup and install it on my old hard drive then just dual boot from there or would I have to do something else?

reply to post by iCEdTenG


That's basically it. When your machine goes to load an OS it will prompt you with options on what you want to run.

Easy as pie.

reply to post by iCEdTenG


You may find it is a bit more challenging.

Here is a link on how to dual boot with xp in first (I know this is not the OP's case, but other may benefit from it).
apcmag.com...

Here is what must be done to dual boot with Vista installed first:
apcmag.com...

I hope this helps.



[edit on 1/19/2008 by mrmonsoon]

Really? On separate drives?

I've never done it with Vista myself, but I've had machines with XP and XP as well as machines with XP and 2000 and it was just that simple.

The tutorials above show how to install 2 on 1 drive with 100% partition in Vista.

mrmonsoon, do you know something I don't? (I'm sure there's plenty)

In the case where vista is installed first (for dual boot on same drive) you must take extra actions as adding xp will break vista's boot loader.

This "may" not be an issue on seprate drives, but I thought the info might be helpful anyways.

If you google it, you will find many people have issues with vista+xp

Here's an update on the dual boot situation.

I've formatted and installed XP on my second hard drive and everything is working great. The only thing that it doesn't do is give me the option at startup to boot to my choice of OS. I think this is to do with me not setting both my harddrives to slave (i think?) according to some of the articles i read. However this doesn't bother me as i just hit F12 to enter into the boot menu and boot from there which really isn't a hassle.

Thanks for all your help guys.