Dual Boot?

[chirp]

Hi all,

I have put together a nice system that is running well....few or no problems (knock wood).
Now that I am ready to hook up to the office server from home, I find out that the office fire wall is not Vista compatible and probably won't be for a while.
I figure there are two options. Either I start to look at things like "MY PC" and what I think are known as shells or, I set my system up with a dual boot and carry both Vista and XP.

I have plenty of hard drive space (2 x 250 gb) so I think I am good to go for the dual boot if that is my best option but, I really don't know which option would be best or how to go about either. Has anyone had any experience with either? Care to give me any advice????

Thanks!

 

[Thermopylae_480]

I don't have any experience with Vista or the software you mentioned, but if you want to dual boot, simply install Windows XP on a separate partition, or hard drive, from Vista.

 

[Solaris17]

I can help here iv had both i used partition magic to split my HDD and i installed vista on one and xp was already on the other only problem is id watch out if i were you for some reason vista does not like to dual boot iv seen this on a couple of my machines and my buddys. so step one have xp installed step 2 find a partitioner of your choice i dont know of any except partition magic and the one included on xp...only thing is i dont think the one on xp will even partition them...then pop in your vista DVD and select the drive of your choice....the only thing i can think of that causes vista to hate dual booting sooo much is that when their are 2 OS's installed xp uses its own prog to list them on boot well vista uses a totally diff boot loader than the previous os's and i think they conflict the problems i hade were the standard missing windows folder missing HAL.dll and the nt one dont remember the name.....that and after your done vista and boot into xp things didnt like to start correctly specially if you scan disk with vista.

 

[oily_17]

I am dual booting both with no problems ATM,but as Solaris said it is better to have XP installed first.

If you want to install XP with Vista already on the drive check this out,it may help you.