EDIT: Read Post #8



Hello, I am wondering is there a possibility that I can have XP Home and Vista Ultimate running on the same computer using two hard drives? I'm not sure exactly about boot managers and things like that, and I would be grateful if someone could help me

Just go into the BIOS and choose which harddrive to boot from.

I think that’s for 1 harddrive (partitioning it and running Vista/XP)

Quote from imthebestracerthereis :

Hello, I am wondering is there a possibility that I can have XP Home and Vista Ultimate running on the same computer using two hard drives? I'm not sure exactly about boot managers and things like that, and I would be grateful if someone could help me

To be honest, it may be easier to have them both on the same hard drive. If you put one on one HDD and one on the other, then every time you want to boot the other OS, as someone stated above, you have to go to the BIOS and change the boot disk setting. If they are both on the same drive, you can access a simple menu at boot telling the computer which OS to boot without having to change settings. But if you aren't going to switch that often, then I guess booting off of separate drives is a good way to keep things... separate.

Or just use a better bootloader, such as grub, or similar.

I run Ghost Xp Chinese edition on my 40gb partition and my windows vista basic on the other 40gb partition on a separate HDD. when i boot up my pc it gets to the point of booting and see's there is 2 operating systems and asks what one would i like to use.

BTW the Chinese windows is so i can play chinese games like crysis and so on they just don't seem to install on English windows Differnt installation packs???

and half the shit u get may be in a proper box but its still fake but seem to register online with EA and stuff so i try not to add the mafia, and yes it is the mafia the Chinese don't copy half the crap here! i buy plenty of dvds and most are in Russian

Ok so if I use one hard drive for XP and Vista, I would need to partition. How?

And when I partition, I use XP, no need to uninstall?

Quote from imthebestracerthereis :

Hello, I am wondering is there a possibility that I can have XP Home and Vista Ultimate running on the same computer using two hard drives? I'm not sure exactly about boot managers and things like that, and I would be grateful if someone could help me

Yes you can:

just install them (first XP then vista) on the HDD of your choice.
You will later have the boot loader from vista and can choose what Os you want to load. Only makes problems when you want to get rid of vista i.e then you have to perform some action (canbe googled) to not also destroy the XP installation.


If you don't want a boot loader and two complete indipendent OS installations you can unplug 1 HDD and install 1 OS on the other HDD and vice versa with the next HDD. Depends on your board sometimes it also works without unplugging the HDDs.

Depending on your Motherboard (SATA/SATA II/ Raid boards usually have that) you can then hit F8 or F11 or what your board manual tells you to open an "onboard boot-loader" and choose from which HDD /DVD/CD etc. you want to boot.
No need to go into the BIOS each time.

To sort the partitions out i use PCLinuxOS (the old version of it cant remember which I'm running Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP on different partitons and Windows 98 (for dos games cant be bothered to use dosbox) on Microsoft Virtual Pc 2007 and soon I'll be booting vista, ubuntu and xp on same computer

EDIT : Sorry I didnt read your post you have 2 hard drives not 1

Aren't the partitions named as different logical drives anyway, so the process is exactly the same as using to seperate physical drives after you've done the partitioning?