XP Partition, Vista Partition

[Brautigam]

I have been using Vista for about 3 weeks now and I have experienced many annoying bugs in a bunch of different programs. The computer I am using now has nothing on it since I have been running off of my external harddrive for this time so I don't care if I have to reformat everything, it's no problem.

What I want to do is be able to run XP and Vista on my computer. The only reason I want Vista is so when Halo 2 Vista comes out, I can play that. Otherwise, I can live with XP since it is just more efficient. I have a 120GB HDD so I guess I can split the drive into 2 partitions, probably a 20GB for Vista and a 100GB for XP.

I just want to know if this seems like the right thing to do? Should I install 2 versions of Windows on two separate partitions? Will there be any conflicts?

And one more question...will I be able to pick which version I want to run when I turn on the computer? I think that screen with different choices that I have seen before will pop up after I install two different operating systems, but I am not sure.

[Seshomaru Samma]

I have been using Vista for about 3 weeks now and I have experienced many annoying bugs in a bunch of different programs. The computer I am using now has nothing on it since I have been running off of my external harddrive for this time so I don't care if I have to reformat everything, it's no problem.

What I want to do is be able to run XP and Vista on my computer. The only reason I want Vista is so when Halo 2 Vista comes out, I can play that. Otherwise, I can live with XP since it is just more efficient. I have a 120GB HDD so I guess I can split the drive into 2 partitions, probably a 20GB for Vista and a 100GB for XP.

I just want to know if this seems like the right thing to do? Should I install 2 versions of Windows on two separate partitions? Will there be any conflicts?

And one more question...will I be able to pick which version I want to run when I turn on the computer? I think that screen with different choices that I have seen before will pop up after I install two different operating systems, but I am not sure.

You can install many operating systems on your computer. At one point I had Windows XP, Ubuntu , Debian and Puppy Linux on my laptop without any problems.

What you could do is part your disc like that :

C: XP

D: data

E: Vista

this way you can access your data (movies,files,music) from both OS easily. In theory you can access the data even if you don't create a special partition since we are talking about 2 Windows systems. But I find it cleaner to have a special data partition.

I would give 20GB to XP and maybe 30GB to Vista , I usually keep my XP partition well under 10GB but with Vista you can never know....

If you feel comfortable with XP command line partitioner (it's pretty easy) you can part your disc during installation, Vista should have the same function. If you like graphical interface better you can use Partition Magic (which is great but costs money) or the Gparted Live CD (which is great and doesn't cost money)

Get Gparted here , burn it to a CD and boot from it like you would boot from a Windows installation CD. It will give you a graphical interface with which to part your discs. You can also resize /delete/move partitions.

And yes - you will get a screen upon boot which will let you choose the OS

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Welcome to the Windows Forum!

I have no personal experience with Vista, but I have many multiboot systems with older operating systems, e.g. Windows XP and Windows 2000. There should be no problem having different partitions with different operating systems, as long as the partitions are Primary partitions.

In the past, usually you install the older Windows in a partition, then you install the newer in another partition. Windows will automatically activate the boot manager, which will let you choose the startup system when you start the computer. The Windows boot manager will keep both partitions visible (e.g. as C: and E:); other boot managers (such as BootMagic, which is part of PartitionMagic) will hide the inactive partition (meaning each partition will be visible as C: when started).

Let us know if you need further clarifications.