Dual Boot with Vista and XP

Paul:

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that this worked for me when I got caught in this trap. I think Vista has a predisposition to take the C: drive letter if it is free. In my case, I had it take F: once and the boot partition took C:, but after hiding the boot partition then Vista was able to grab C: at the next reboot.

I agree that clearing the assignments in the Mounted Devices registry key will be more likely to guarantee success, so do this if at all possible.

As another alternative, if Sam49 still has an image of his Vista partition when it had the correct drive letter assignments (C: for Vista and D: for XP) then couldn't he:

1. Hide the XP partition
2. Restore the Vista partition
3. Reboot into Vista, which should now be C:, and make sure that D: is not assigned to anything else
4. Un-hide the XP partition
5. Reboot into Vista to confirm that D: is the XP partition and C: is the Vista partition.

 

Hi guys I’m back from work and I have done as mudcrab instructions in #16 I followed the instructions to the letter and then tried to boot into Vista, but with no luck I lost even the limited version of Vista, all I got was a blue screen of death, so I guess I must have got it wrong.
So enough is enough life is too short to worry about something that is not going to work. I have decided to forget the images I have already made and bin the lot after all I did have all my documents and the files I use on a day to day basis on a different partition, so the worst I have to do is reinstall the operations systems yet again.
So I have restored an image I had previously made with TI 10 when I just had XP on this computer. Just before I installed Vista, as you can see on the screen shot i have posted drive C: is large enough to partition to install Vista.
This is the setup I have before Vista i then used diskpart in Vista to spilt drive C: and install Vista on the partition vista made it then gave Vista the drive letter F:, so if I now use the same method to install vista as before, but should I use disk management in XP to change any drive letters before I install vista so vista gets the D: drive letter or just carry on as I did before.
Then before I make another image I need to use some third party boot software so I can hide each operating system as some people have said in this post , I also need to hide vista when I boot into XP as when you do this XP removes all Vistas restore point s. I did use BDCEdit before but i carnt see how I can hide partitions when booting, i would like to hide Vista when is XP and hide XP when in Vista if that’s possible
So can someone please give me some advice on what to do next please?
I thank you all for the advice already given but let me start again and get it right this time from the off.

Regards

 

Just to update you all that have read this post.

I have now got two 80Gb hard drives one with XP on and one with vista on. as i use vista most of the time soi have thathad drive connected and just connect the xp one as i need it, i intend to get two hard drive scddys so i can swap them at will before i boot up.

So i can now access both operating systems when i need to and xp leaves vista alone and whats even better i have made an inmage file with true image v11 and i can restore it woth 100% success.

So i might not have a dual boot system by just clicking a key i when the caddys arive i just have to pull one out and put in the one i want so i still have both xp and vista on this one machine..

Its not what i started to do but it works

Best regards to anyone who has helped me in this matter