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Vista/xp OS's on one laptop


DeanM
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Hey! B) im new here!! looking forward to checking out the forum and seeing what i can learn from it!!

I have a problem...

My laptop is a Dell inspiron 1520 and came with Vista home premium. vista looks cool and is ok for normal use, however i am doing electronic engineering in college and i use a good few engineering programs that were mainly designed for xp and just dont run too well on vista. also vista is too unreliable at times.

so i decided that i want to keep using vista, but i decided to set up a separate partion to run xp for when i need better performance and stuff. xp will only have the programs i need etc and nothing extra like media players or even internet explorer. just my apps.

Vista is loaded on the C: drive and i installed xp on a separate D: partition. once i had installed xp it worked really well. was very fast and one of the programs i had recently tried on vista and didn work ran fine on xp. anyway xp installed and was running fine.

however after a reboot it loaded up straight to xp!! thats not what i wanted. i want the option to boot either xp or vista. i realised after a while that vista and xp have different boot loaders and heard that xp wouldnt recognise vista's and could overwrite it. i put the vista installation disk in and done a repair install on the C: drive. it said pick this option if having problems starting up. i picked it cos i thought it would restore vistas booter and then i would be able to choose between vista or xp. but then it loaded into vista and i cant boot into xp!!

does anyone know what i should do to fix this? i want to be able to turn on my laptop and then either pick xp or vista to boot up.

I would appreciate any info!! thanks in advance!!

Dean.

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If you have XP installed, then install Vista on a second partition, it will automatically activate the Vista boot manager.

However, if you do it the other way around (first Vista, then XP), you will have to set up the boot manager manually. Boris' link may help you with that (I cannot access that site momentarily).

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Hey thanks for the replies.

i should have said tho that literally straight after postin this i was readin thru the forum n saw d phrase 'dual boot'. i thought to myself 'dammit why didn i think to search that!!!' so i googled it and the first link that came up(it actually happens to be the same link Boris left) and within minutes i had it sorted out!! most of the steps i had already done!! such as restoring vista's boot loader. so all i had to do was downlaod the program in the link and add xp to the entries! to be honest it was so simple i felt stupid for postin this!! altho i shud have looked it up before i added Xp!!

thanks again for the replies!!

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