Hey guys. Vista is pretty cool eh? Except for it being agrivatingly slow. Anyway let me wade in on the dual booting thing. I installed a 30GB hard drive I had laying around. I formatted the drivew in NTFS. I reset the BIOS to boot from CD. When it came time I chose the 30 gig now my G drive and started the installation. Everything went pretty sooth, the boot loader worked fine and all. There was one little problem. When I booted to Vista the G drive became my C drive and the other 5 partitions got their lettering scrambled. When I booted to XP Home my original C drive became my C drive....again. Not good and too confusing for a feeble minded fogie like me! j/k, it's not that bad yet.
Anyway I did a quick wipe of the G and made sure my drive letter associations were intact in Disk Management. Then I booted into XP Home and started the Vista CD in windows. This works I guess because it's both an upgrade and a fresh installer. When it came time to choose the location I specified the G drive and the installation went flawlessly. I now have Vista running on my G drive. Oh oh, a new minor problem. The boot loader shows 2 vista programs and the XP, now called older windows OS or some such. Since the bootloader is on the C drive I figured I could modify the boot.ini file to delete the old Vista which gives you an error when you try to load it.
Well there wasn't anything on the boot.ini file. That's because Vista uses a different version. A file called bcdedit.exe which is in the system32 folder. The only way to open it is with the command prompt, and no matter what I did, it kept denying me permission to modify it. What I ended up doing was opening msconfig and went to the boot tab, where I was able to delete it.
Now everything is hunky dory, as David would say. I just have the Vista and the XP on the boot loader window now.
Something else. Be watchful as some of the sites with updated "Vista" drivers? Well they just don't work on a fresh install. I thing they (AVG for one) were designed to upgrade their perogram if you do an upgrade, not a clean install. Anyway excuse me now. I'm so tired of all these security prompts, I'm going to go undo what MS tried so hard to build, and reassign all the files on my G drive. Permissions, ownership, effective permissions etc. I'm expecting at least one crash along the way so I may as well just push the envelope from the get go eh? Oh last thing. I ordered the Vista CD on Sunday and it came today Wednesday. Pretty impressive.
Edit sorry about the spelling. I haven't installed IESpel yet.
