Installing XP on the same system as Vista

[dastari]

Hi
I recently bought a machine that came with Vista pre-installed. I installed a second hard drive in the machine on the other sata connection on the motherboard.

I've been trying to install XP on this second hard drive, but when I do it stops me from loading vista, and the best I can do is get a dual-boot screen every time I startup.

I would prefer to automatically boot into vista every time unless I press f12 at startup and manually choose to boot from the other drive. I think this is what it should be doing anyway, so I don't really know what to do.

The bios is set to boot from the main hard drive. When I boot from the newly installed drive it gives an error (something like insert system disk..).

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[Phantasm66]

You can change the timeout of the boot menu.

If its the XP boot menu, then edit boot.ini on c:\.

If its the Vista boot menu, use this command:

bcdedit /timeout x

where "x" is the number of seconds you want the menu to appear. Setting it to 0 will suppress the menu totally, I believe.

 

[dastari]

Stopping the boot screen coming up entirely would mean there would be absolutely no way of getting to xp (without changing the boot.ini settings every time).

I fixed this in the end by simply removing the vista drive when installing xp on the other drive. Now my pc automatically boots into vista unless I press f12 and choose the other hard drive manually, which is exactly what I wanted.

Thanks!

 

[Phantasm66]

Basically meant that XP never got to write into the Vista disk's MBR - then wrote it into its own disk's boot sector instead. Might be a way to do this without having to disconnect the drive, let me think about it....

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Change the hdd boot priority in BIOS.