XP Home/ Vista 64 dual booting

[(dud)]

Hi

Sorry if this topic has been covered before i read through a couple of pages on dual booting and couldnt find anything

I have just brought a new pc, duo core 2 3.16 with 4 gm ram, 500GB Hard Drive, and put my old 160 Gbb in as well.

I Installed windows XP home on it, and then relaised I should put on a 64 bit operating system to take full use of the ram and cpu. Using acronis disk director i shrank my xp partiton down by 50 gb and moved it to make a new vista partition. ( my large HDD has a vista partition of 50 gb, then XP Partition of 50GB, then logical partition). I made the xp partition hidden and set the vista partition active, restarted and installed vista64, worked perfectly and installed drivers. Using my rescuse cd of acronis, i swapped over the partitions and booted into xp, worked perfectly, I installed the boot manager with acronis, which detected both os on seperate drives. problem was would boot xp, but would not boot vista, would come up saying GLDR loading then have a lot of gibberish afterwards (sorry can tell you what is exactly says as not near home computer). but i can change boot into vista is i change active partitons e.tc

Does anybody know any solution, is there a setting in acronis i am missing or dose it not boot 64 bit os?

I know i could install both OS on one partition but, like to have em seperate incase something happens to one ( i have had previous problems with removing one and the boot loader gettin stuffed)

any advise would be greatful

thanks in advance

[Blam]

Welcome to PF1

You complicated dual booting by alot...

Boot from your Vista CD, and at the setup screen select repair my installation, then run startup repair.

Once that it done it should be fine into Vista.

Then, download EasyBCD:
http://neosmart.net/downloads/softwa...CD%201.7.2.exe

Add the XP boot entry. Follow this tutorial:
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+Vista

And you cannot install both Xp and Vista on the same partition. The two will definitely conflict and delete each others files...

Blam

[wainuitech]

I know i could install both OS on one partition

Welcome to Press F1.

The quoted bit -- NO YOU CANT - you can install two or more OS's on the one drive in SEPARATE partitions, but not in the one partition.

What you should have done is installed XP first - shrink the drive to allow a separate partition. Then boot from the Vista DVD, tell it to install on the blank space, it would have created a partition, formatted and installed, creating a dual boot for both OS's.

While there are ways of fixing it, it may be a bit time consuming - What I would do is wipe the vista partition - fix XP so it boots normally, then reinstall Vista as described above. OR boot from the Vista DVD, but when getting to the point of installing, bottom left - repair my computer.

[(dud)]

does it matter which partition vista lies in the first or the second, second question in doing this it will use vista boot loader?, If i decide not to use vista boot loader, do i then need to do a fixmbr for windows xp?

[wainuitech]

Shouldn't matter which Partition Vista is on, But I always set it to the second one, meaning XP on first, Vista Second.

When Vista Installs it looks for other OS's and will change the bootloader to allow dual booting.
Try the suggestions of repairing the boot loader from the Vista DVD.