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Dual Boot Question


Nanob0t

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Hello everyone, I have a few questions.  Here's my situation:

Recently I bought a laptop and it came with Vista and other great hardware.  I've been writing music for quite some time now, but I want to hook my guitars, basses, keyboards, etc. to my laptop and record them.  I got a very expensive MIDI controller for... let's just say free.  I went to install the drivers and it says the company isn't going to make drivers for Vista... Disappointing.

So, I have a corporate edition copy of Windows XP Professional Edition and I would like to dual boot my computer, but I have no knowledge of this.  I do a crap load of computer work and hacking, I've just never dealt with two OS's on a computer at a time before.  Questions:

To dual boot do I just install the software off the disc?

If I dual boot, do I have access to all of the directories on the C: hard drive.  If no I need to transfer my software onto XP?

How much space am I looking at using on my hard drive?

If there are any creative solutions to my problem other than dual booting, I'm willing to try.

That's all... Thanks!

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http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp

You will need to reinstall everything for XP.

I tried that method th eother day, and it dod not work for me. I would back up everything to another pc,a nd then just put XP on the entire drive unless you really want vista, you need to partition the drive and install xp on one then vista on the other. If your Vista disk is a reinstall or recovery disk(like most come with from Gateway, Dell, etc) it will probably not give you the option to format and partition the drive. Mine just wipes out the drive and installs onto the whole drive. Not what I was expecting.

When I tried to resize vista using the vista install disk, everything workd fine, but when I tried to install XP onto the remaining space, it could not see vista at all, and thus wiped everything out. Maybe it was just the disks I had and they way they were setup, but I did not have any luck getting them both on there. If you have an OEM disk of Vista and XP, then you should have no problems getting them both on their, but I would backup everythign first before you go crazy trying anything. Also, Vista is hard to get drivers for if when you install it and it cant find your ethernet card drivers. Ihad this problem putting Vista back on the pc and I couldnt get online with the onboard Ethernet card. I had to install a seperate linksys card that I had a disk for in order to get online to update everything. Vista is just going to take a while for it to mature and you need a big learning curve to really dig into it.

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XP isn't aware that Vista exists, you should always install Windows OSs oldest first, the newer versions are aware of, and account for, the older versions. As for drivers, that works the same for any OS, be it XP, Vista, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, BeOS, OSX, all of them. Download and store your drivers before you format so you have them all there waiting for you when you end up at a 640x480 16 colour desktop with no networking, audio, etc...

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I've currently got XP MCE2005 and Xp 64-bit dual booting on two 500gig HDD's. I am tempted to add another drive and put Vista on it, but I still do not like Vista. I want it just to learn it before it starts to go mainstream and people switch over completely. Although, at work, we still sue Win95 and 98 on some old legacy machines because their hardware has older periphials and only have drivers that work for them, like larger Open Reel tape drives with serial connectors.

625px-Largetape.jpg

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