Guys,

Whats the best way to do this?

I have XP on a drive from a laptop I sold and I would like to be able to dual boot it either from the second internal drive or from an usb drive

I've lost touch with the best way to do this, I used to be able to boot OSX from either USB or 2nd internal.

Anyway dual booting Vista and XP and not on the same internal drive?

Many thanks, cheers

(also put a Q in the vista section, posted here in 17" section because of having the same hardware)

having two seperate drives works best, you then should be able to configure Wondows Control Panel "System" to prompt upon boot up to select an OS

I also came across a little program that helps manage Vista and XP for Dual booting..but thats back home if I still have it.

As far as using seperate drives, it's jsut a matter sfo completing an OS install on both drives & then inserting the drive you want to load. If you are going for a USB HDD setup, keep in mind you don't need a 7200RPM drive.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 -EasyBSD GUI based Vista OS manager. simple to use & makes dual booting a snap.

I use 1 patitioned drive on my XP/Vista setup, of course I yanked out all of Dell's partitions (media direct/diag) & have 4 Primary partitions

C-XP Boot/Applications
D-games/media
E-archives/drivers/backups
V-vista boot/Applications

this program works fine for Dual booting Xp and Vista.

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

Hope this helps you out.

It did, great stuff.

I waited until the 2nd internal drive with the XP image was in place, and ran the installer of vistabootpro

I followed the following sticky of how to dual boot (from the online support button in the program) and it worked exactly. I had to edit my boot.ini files to match that shown on the thread, as the 2nd internal drive with XP is seen as drive zero

http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/ab...a4c09bbd6bdf97


Thanks a lot all, now have working XP / Vista dual boot on different laptop drives, handy for some software I have that is XP specific, cheers