[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Ok, Win7 will come in a few months, for now I just want to have XP and Vista, on seperate partitions on a 250GB HDD

I want 60 GB for XP, and the rest for Vista.

When I get Windows 7, it will be on a seperate HDD.

Does this work? Booting from 2 partitions on one drive and from a different drive?

And what order should I install XP and Vista in, bearing in mind XP's smaller? Or does it make no odds at all?

XP will be 32-bit, and Vista 64-bit.


I also have a 1TB HDD, that I want to use just for storing data, but its unallocated and I don't know how to change it to free space?

Thanks, sorry for being a noob on this, but I've never built a PC before, and have never had fresh new drives..

Thanks, Ollie.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Ok, I read Social's sticky, and Vista is now installing on the 172.9gb primary partition, leaving 60 for XP, but how do I then make that primary also? So that XP can install..

Also I still need to know how to make my data drive free space instead of unallocated?

[Carbon]

I have no idea why you'd want to boot Vista considering 7 is just a better version of Vista.

Just dual-boot 7 and XP.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Why doesn't matter all that much, I have several reasons and I'm asking if any can give advice on how best to do it, rather than tell me not to.

[Carbon]

In that case I would have installed XP first, then Vista so it would pick up the XP and do the Vista bootloader, then 7. As is it's going to be a pain in the ass until you get 7 to fix the bootloader.

Also you should never ever do partitioning after install but you'll need 4 partitions, don't worry about 'primary' or whatever though. Just allocate enough for each OS then allocate the rest as a separate partition.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Sorry, I already installed Vista..

So should I install VistaBootPro, and then XP?

Or just reboot and install XP without the VBP? Because I heard it wasn't neccessary, so I don't really understand why you'd use it?

[Carbon]

What'll happen is when you install XP, it probably won't pick up the Vista install, because they use completely different bootloaders. The Vista bootloader is 'backwards-compatible' while the XP one isn't. So when you install XP, you won't be able to boot into Vista. But if you install 7 last, the 7 bootloader (which is the same as Vista's) will find both OSs as well as itself (obviously) and you'll be fine.

So just don't expect to be able to boot into Vista before installing 7. Don't bother with Vistabootpro unless that's a big deal.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Ok thanks, Vista install didn't work anyway, same error as before expanding files doesn't get past 0% then error pops up saying missing or corrupt files.

So I installed XP on the partition where I want Vista as well as the other one, in the hope that upgrading may work - it didn't.

I'm now thinking my DVD drive may be the issue as it's quite old (IDE!!) so may not support the install (I've heard about this being an issue for some people..

But I'm hoping to buy a HD DVD drive soon, which will obviously be more recent, and I think the one I looked at had a "Vista Certified" or something similar label, so it should work.


One other thing, can I change the name of the OS on the boot screen? Or do I need VBP, or equivalent program to enable me to do this?

Thanks, Ollie.

[Carbon]

You can change the name just editing boot.ini manually if you want.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Ok, will do. But I have to wait for new drive unfortuantly now anyway..

Because I've got x86 and x64 versions of XP installed, but neither on the system volume (because Vista will go there when I can eventually install it)

So it seems to now not give me an option to boot the x86, and just boots straight into XP PRO x64..

Kinda annoying, but I guess when I install Vista the boot loader should pick up both versions?