dual booting

[chesters1]

my sis is contemplating a new pc for her work ,trouble is to have it installed with XP costs £110 rather than vista that comes as standard through the range

the trouble comes is this new machine comes with a "setup" disk rather than a vista disk ,dual boot could be an option but ofcourse you need a vista disk not a setup disk to do it (she has the XP disk)

 

my thoughts would be to install XP on an external USB hard drive but can it be done? how could i give her the option of choosing XP or Vista to boot into? .as this machine comes with a good after sales "service" it would be better to leave the hard drive as it is and let her bugger up the XP installation on the external disk

 

she could also still work having fell back on the vista drive if problems occur (she hates vista as do i)

 

it would be easy to boot of either just by going into the bios and choosing the boot order but sis isnt PC knowledgable so going into the bios would not be a good idea

 

so in short is it possible to have some small clicky thing at boot that asks what you want to use bearng in mind one is a removable drive ,cheers

 

had pc's had dos it would be easy peasy

having XP on a seperate disk would then give her an extra £110 to get a faster processor from the "build" dooda on the website

Edited September 18, 2008 by chesters1

[jimpy0]

XP will only boot or dual boot from a c drive { bit pedantic that way }

 

if its a new pc get them to send with no op/sys

then find your own

 

job done money saved

[chesters1]

no operating system isnt an option from dell (my sis likes dell)

[Alnath]

XP will boot from any drive not just C so long as it is a drive on IDE or SATA. To dual boot you need the older OS on first and then when you install the newer one it will guide you though the process of having 2 OS' on the drive.

[Chris W]

Ok, the easiest (and cheapest) way to do this is to create 2 partitions. As part of the windows XP set-up you will be asked to create / delete / edit the partitions, create 2. If you are using both a 50-50 split is fine.

 

here is a good guide on how to do this: (Vista installed already) http://www.ehow.com/how_2248021_dual-boot-vista-xp.html

[chesters1]

i'm just looking at the microsoft "virtual" pc software anyone with any experience i havnt used any since soft windows on the mac