Dual-Booting Win XP and Vista

Just when you have Windows XP working exactly the way you want, along comes Windows Vista. You want the new OS, but you need to keep the old one as well. Do you need to buy a new PC?

No way: Dual-boot instead.

Dual-booting means installing two operating systems on your

computer and, at start-up, choosing which one to launch. Each OS runs

independently of the other, with its own settings and its own installed

programs. You can install two or more instances of Microsoft Windows XP

or of Vista, or any combination of Win XP, Vista, Linux, and older

Windows versions. But right now, I'll focus on how to add Vista to your

existing Win XP system.

Before starting, you need either a separate partition on your

hard drive or a separate drive; if you install Vista on the partition

where Windows XP is already installed, Win XP will no longer run. Open My Computer,

and make sure it shows multiple hard drive icons (one for each

partition). Now check whether the second partition has enough space for

Vista (at least 20GB to 30GB if you plan to install major programs). If

not, or if you don't have a second partition, start with step 1 to

create one.

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1 Set Up Partitions

Partitioning programs such as Norton Partition Magic make partition creation and management reasonably easy. Use the Resize command to shrink your existing partition and then the Create option to make a new one. After a reboot (which can take some time) your new partition will be in place.

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2 Install Vista

At this point, you install Vista, either from within Win XP by

inserting the Vista disc and letting Autorun do its thing, or by

inserting the disc and rebooting the system (as long as your PC is

configured to read the optical drive before the hard drive).

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Choose Installation Type

You have two main tasks during the installation. First, on the "Which type of installation do you want?" screen, choose Custom; selecting Upgrade

changes your Win XP installation into Vista, which of course won't

result in a dual-boot environment. Then, on the subsequent screen, you

have to tell Vista where you want it installed; this is where you

choose the new partition.

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Start It Up

After that, just wait for the installation to finish. Your PC will

reboot itself more than once, and with each reboot you'll see your new Boot menu, with Earlier Version of Windows at the top and Microsoft Windows Vista—highlighted—next. Use the arrow keys to select the OS you want to load, and press Enter.

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3 System Check

The installation process warns you if you select a partition on which

you already have Windows installed. If that happens, click Cancel and choose the correct partition.

4 Tweak It

Once Vista is installed, you can configure the Boot menu. But where

earlier versions of Windows conveniently used the boot.ini file to

store boot details, Vista uses the Boot Configuration Data (BCD)

store—bcdedit.exe from the command prompt—and this utility is

stunningly unintuitive. You're better off downloading VistaBootPro (www.vistabootpro.org) or EasyBCD (www.neosmart.net), both of which give you a GUI environment to work with.

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Finally, Two Warnings

1 The BCD provides a more robust start-up environment for

Windows, but the downside is that if you want a multiboot system, you

must be sure to install Vista last. If you put Vista on a machine and

install Windows XP afterward, Vista won't start, because Boot.ini,

which Win XP adds automatically, will render the BCD useless (although

you can recover it by running the fixntfs.exe utility from within Win

XP).

2 Even when your Win XP/Vista machine is happily

dual-booting, one problem remains. As you work in Vista, the System

Restore utility automatically creates restore points—and you can create

them yourself—that let you launch the system in a previous state and

recover from errors. But when you exit Vista and launch Win XP, the

older OS deletes the Vista restore points.

{tipsource}PCWorld{/tipsource}