Vista & XP question

According to Microsoft you install XP and then Vista; no problem there, but does anyone know if it's best to install Acronis OS selector before installing Vista or after?

Has anyone tried and issues found?

Ta very much

 

Better to Install OSS before Vista, to keep the OSs completely separate.

More info here.

 

The most important thing is, if you want to use OSS to boot isolated installs of XP/Vista is to make sure Windows Install does not see the other OS partition(s) and mingle the bootloaders. Once that happens undoing it is not easy.

 

Please explain the above, I don't quite follow

 

When one Windows installation "sees" another Windows already installed, it will use the same bootloader (or in the case of Vista, install its own version) and create a menu that allows you to boot either the "old" Windows or the "new" Windows.

The problem is that the boot files are all on the same primary partition and so they become mingled. This is a difficult situation to fix if you want isolated installs of Windows. It's much easier to avoid this in the first place than to try and sort it out afterwards. Also, the different Windows partitions are not hidden from each other. I have not run specific tests on this, but from the posts, it seems that OSS is unable to separate the OS's and allow booting into either one directly. OSS ends up booting into the Windows bootloader menu where you have to make another choice.

By "isolated", I mean that each Windows installation is completely installed in its own partition and boots from its own partition. It doesn't know that any other Windows (or any other OS, for that matter) is installed.

Imagine this scenario: You have only XP installed on your computer. You create an image of XP with TI. You then decide to try Vista so you install Vista. Vista sees the current XP installation and installs its boot files into the XP partition. Now when you boot you get a menu asking if you want to boot Vista or XP.

You boot into XP and install a program that screws up your computer. You decide the easiest way to fix the problem is to restore your TI image. So you do. What happens? There is now no option to boot Vista as the image restore replaced the XP partition to a state before Vista was installed. Now you need to boot from the Vista DVD and do a repair to fix it.