I've done some google searching and it seems that dual booting from the same hard drive has some technical problems because of Vista (deletes all back ups, system restores, etc everytime you boot XP)...
because of this I was curious... what if I dual boot from 2 SEPARATE hard drives? I'm assuming these problems would no longer occur?
*** My thought is, I could always just go into BIOS, change the boot order for the HDD that has the OS I want to boot at the time... and there would be NO CONFLICTS WHATSOEVER??? is this correct?
the main reason I want XP is because vista 64 is not compatible with some of the games I want to play, and programs I want to use... For example Peer Guardian, and Command & Conquer 3 tiberium wars among others.
What I usually do is exactly what you said. No matter what you do VIsta will make itself the dominate OS. And it will have a boot loader that gives you the option to choose between Vista and an "earlier version of windows". I personally haven't had problems like this. But I have had problems when installing both OS's on the same drive on different partitions.
I highly suggest installing XP first however. It will make your lofe a hell of a lot easier.
so unfortunately for me I already have vista 64 installed and would "Prefer" not to uninstall and start over... though I can if its absolutely necessary.
what's the approach I should take? can I simply plug in a second HDD, disable the first one in BIOS and go from there??
what about after installing XP... can I keep both HDD's enabled, or do I need to go to BIOS each time I want to switch OS's?
No worries. The process is only a bit harder a riskier after installing XP second. Well, you don't need to do anything fancy to add a second HDD in. Simply set the first hdd as a master (it should be already) and the second to slave by using a jumper. This is an example, but not all hard drives are set up this way. Tell me which kind you have.
Now you are going to need a program called "Vista Boot Pro" This will allow you to fix everything after you install xp. BUT, lets start with the hard drives shall we?
21Q, sorry for taking so long to respond, but I managed to get everything up and running yesterday! I ended up formatting my vista 64 and installing XP first as you recommended. Everything went smoothly and I had no problems!
