Anwar--

It's entirely as Philo said using Virtual PC 2007 or 2004. In that
situation, you're sure going to have a RAM limitation and you should have at
least 2GB to start with--for sure if the PC only has 512MB to deal from.
If multibooting will work for you in your network then I highly recommend
it--I dual boot and triple boot all the time and it works very well for me.

CH

"Anwar Mahmood" <amahmood5@uclan.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:2dab831b-2ad2-4979-bddd-8b6165e99194@b38g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> Hi All,
>
> We're using Windows XP at the moment, but have Windows Vista as well.
> We use Windows Deployment Services (WDS) to image PCs across the
> network.
>
> We've not got everything working on Windows Vista yet, some people
> would like to use it, yet still be able to access applications that
> are currently only available on Windows XP.
>
> Originally, we used Virtual PC 2007 on Windows Vista, and ran Windows
> XP virtually. Worked fine, but
> - XP running virtually is slow
> - some of our PCs have only 512Mb RAM, so dual booting isn't always
> an option
>
> All our PCs have only one HDD. Dual booting the "Microsoft" way
> involves
> - install Windows XP 1st on one partition
> - install Windows Vista 2nd on a second partition
>
> Vista will replace XP's MBR and provide dual booting capabilities.
> However,
> - the first partition will be C:, and the second partition will be D:
> - hence Windows XP will be "correct", but Windows Vista will be
> installed to D:\WINDOWS, D:\Program Files, etc
> - both OSes can see both partitions
> - you can hide the Vista partition within XP, but you can't hide the
> C: partition from Vista because it is the system partition
>
> We use a software delivery process that requires C:\WINDOWS, so the
> Vista installation is useless.
>
> What I need is a third party boot manager, that will
> - provide a menu that lists available OSes
> - configures which partitions are visible, then passes the boot
> sequence on to the respective OS
> - each OS is installed to a C: drive
>
> In the past, I've used Ranish Partition Manager for this, which works
> very well, but it is a manual install and configure exercise. With
> our current environment, computer setup is almost *completely*
> automated;
> - user unboxes PC
> - user registers the PC (this is our own process, but essentially
> this allocates an IPv4 address on the DHCP server, creates a computer
> object in AD, and a few other things)
> - user boots to the network (F12 / PXE boot)
> - user selects an image from the WDS menu
> - both Windows XP and Windows Vista have been automated, so neither
> asks the user for any input
> - 30 minutes later, the computer is ready to use
>
> This is something end users do themselves. I need to use a third
> party boot manager, but deployed and managed through the "network",
> automatically, preferably through WDS.
>
> I don't think it can be done, but I can't possibly be the only one
> grappling with this one!
>
> Any and all ideas are welcome!
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Anwar