How to Dual Boot between 2 Hard Drives

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I have a question.

I have 2 hard drives on my PC. One hard drive has Win Xp installed on it. The other I would like to intsall Win Vista beta and be able to dual boot between the 2 drives.

My question is do I have to format the second drive as a primary or logical drive and does it have to be partitioned. Or can I install Vista onto that drive as is without partioning it.

Cheers
 
The second drive should contain a primary partition. It doesn't necessarily have to be formatted, but I'd certainly recommend it.

I don't know how Vista does things, but XP and other versions of Windows (XP/2000) will install a boot loader onto the active, primary partition which will give you a list of Windows OSes during boot up so you can select between them. This boot loader can be overwritten with an XP/2000 boot loader in the event you decide Vista isn't for you...
 
Thanks for your reply.

One more question, On the second drive can I leave it as one whole partition and can it be in the NTFS format.

Cheers
 
Thanks for your help.

Got it working last night and your right Xp loads a boot sequence at startup so I can choose which operating system to run.

The new Vista upgrade looks great, just a few minor bugs microsoft need to iron before it's released.

Can't wait til they release the final version so I can get my sound card working.....

Regards

Frosty :)
 
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