how can i install vista/xp on the same harddrive without breaking anything on it?

[legacyfan]

i m planning on doing a duel boot with xp/vista on the same hard drive and would like an idea on how to do this without breaking the other one what is the best way to do this? any help would be appreciated

Edited May 25, 2021 by legacyfan

[Dave-H]

3 hours ago, legacyfan said:

i m planning on doing a double boot with xp/vista on the same hard drive and would like an idea on how to do this without breaking the other one what is the best way to do this? any help would be appreciated (and please no duel boot jokes)

Just to be clear, although two operating systems can go on the same physical disk, they have to go in different partitions on that disk.
IIRC Vista and above have to be installed on drive C: but XP can go on drive D: (or any other drive letter you choose.)
C: still has to be the boot drive though. I actually have Windows 98 on drive C: and Windows XP on drive D: on the same physical disk, and have had for years.
I've never done a true dual boot with an OS newer than XP though (my Windows 10 installation is on a completely separate disk).

[Vistapocalypse]

There are a couple of old sticky threads by spacesurfer in the Windows Vista forum that may contain useful information (or else why are they still there?)

[jaclaz]

9 hours ago, Dave-H said:

IIRC Vista and above have to be installed on drive C: but XP can go on drive D: (or any other drive letter you choose.)
C: still has to be the boot drive though. I actually have Windows 98 on drive C: and Windows XP on drive D: on the same physical disk, and have had for years.

No, there is not any such limitation for Vista+.

There is the need of a "boot" (what the MS guys call "system") volume, i.e. an active, primary partition (which normally would get a C: drive letter) where the boot files must reside (i.e. namely) NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and BOOT.INI for XP and BOOTMGR and \boot\BCD for Vista, then you can have (say) XP on another volume, let's say D: and Vista in yet another volume, let's say E: (or viceversa, XP on E: and Vista on D:) these other volumes can be either primary partitions or .logical voluems inside extended

As an example, I have (or have had) machines with DOS on C: (this is non-negotiable) Windows 98 on D: (and yes, it is possible, though complex to install it this way), NT or 2K or XP on H: and Vista or  7 on G:.

jaclaz

 

[Dave-H]

Ah, thanks for the clarification jaclaz.
I would think it would be very unusual not to have a complete OS installed on drive C: in any system, but interesting to know that it's not actually essential.

[jaclaz]

3 hours ago, Dave-H said:

Ah, thanks for the clarification jaclaz.
I would think it would be very unusual not to have a complete OS installed on drive C: in any system, but interesting to know that it's not actually essential.

Well, you miss the history then (you are either too young  or too old - and forgetful ).

Back in the good ol'days you had DOS (MS-DOS 6.22) on C: FAT16 (and this was *needed*) then you *added* NT 3.5 or NT 4.00 in dual boot, usually on a second volume (to be able to use the NTFS and a larger volume).

The Win9x changed this because it was mainly a shell over DOS, so you needed anyway the DOS boot files on C:, and at that point it was smarter to have also the Win9x on the same volume, but in the meantime you has (with second release of Windows 95) also FAT32 available that allowed to have a much larger volume (but that was then inaccessible from NT).

Also, remember how the original Windows 95 was intended (or at least allowed) to dual boot with MS-DOS 6.22, at the time we had lots of fun on multiboot systems, filesystem limitations of the various OS's and the limitations of the *only* bootmanager we had available, i.e. NTLDR, heck, Gilles Vollant wrote Bootpart in 1993:

https://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

At the time Microsoft had actual smart people working for them and provided the means to make transitions from an OS (that was working just fine, MS-DOS 6.x+Windows 3.11) to the new one (Either NT 3.5/4.0 or Windows 95 that - particularly the latter - while much more capable were initially far from being "production ready", particularly with the existing tools/programs, that were all DOS-centric) , I believe that anyone in 1993/1994/1995 had similar setups, it was only later (more or less with Win95 second release) that there was a huge turnover of machines (think of 386 and 486) to the new Pentium ones, because - simply put - the new OS's were bloated and needed a lot more resources (history repeats itself, lower end machines that ran just fine with 7 are now largely NOT working smoothly with Windows 10).

But the "core" feature of NT based systems (possibility to divide "boot" and "system" volumes) remained unchanged, to the point that starting with Vista (but the trend was more evident with 7) the "default" install would have two volumes (one with no letter assigned with the boot files and one with the actual system with drive letter C: assigned) and this has remained unchanged even now and on UEFI systems.

jaclaz

 

[Dave-H]

Thanks, that's fascinating stuff!
I bought my first PC in 1993 in the Windows 3.1 days, but I never attempted dual booting until I dual booted Windows 98 and Windows 2000, in 2000!
I thought that having an NT option would be better for video editing, which I'd just got into, faster and more stable than Windows 98.
I waited ages for Windows 2000 to come out because I wanted to wait for FAT32 capability on the NT system, as Windows 98 couldn't use NTFS of course.

[Mr.Scienceman2000]

On 5/13/2021 at 11:01 PM, legacyfan said:

how to do this without breaking the other one what is the best way to do this?

one thing that may break it is leaving system partition mounted on Windows XP and Vista. I had xp or vista messing system attributes from each others causing both unable boot before manually fixed. Easiest way to do is use mountvol command (mountvol <vista drive letter for example D:> on xp side and same on Windows Vista side (xp should be d or e: if single hdd and partition). Second and likely easier way is to open disk management>select partition with currently inactive os>right click>select change drive letter>delete drive letter assigment and click ok (cannot attach screenshot since MSFN only allows me to have 14kb screenshot for some reason, likely posted too big screenshot before)

 

Take that precaution and it will be fine