Dual Boot

I have a machine which I installed Vista Ultimate (32 bit) on. I have two WD
Raptor hard drives in the machine and recently activated the second drive so
I could so a dual boot to look at Vista Ultimate 64 bit from my tech-net
subscription. I was not able to complete the install before I got a blue
screen.

I attempted to install Xp on the second drive after reformatting it from the
vista 64 bit. It also failed to boot. I read some information and finally
disable the master sata boot drive and installed Vista 64 on the second drive
and it worked. When I added my primary drive back up and tried to boot 64 bit
again it blue screened.

What am I doing wrong and how can I get my machine to do a dual boot with
Vista 32 and 64?

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:38:00 -0800, doncraft
<doncraft@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I have a machine which I installed Vista Ultimate (32 bit) on. I have two WD
>Raptor hard drives in the machine and recently activated the second drive so
>I could so a dual boot to look at Vista Ultimate 64 bit from my tech-net
>subscription. I was not able to complete the install before I got a blue
>screen.
>
>I attempted to install Xp on the second drive after reformatting it from the
>vista 64 bit. It also failed to boot. I read some information and finally
>disable the master sata boot drive and installed Vista 64 on the second drive
>and it worked. When I added my primary drive back up and tried to boot 64 bit
>again it blue screened.
>
>What am I doing wrong and how can I get my machine to do a dual boot with
>Vista 32 and 64?

Sounds like a boot manager problem. Try this:

Partition your first drive into two master partitions. (Partition
Magic will help with this, as will most Linux distros.)

Install V32 and V64 in turn. Both should be able to access your 2nd
drive, so you can share data, but probably won't be able to "see" the
other OS.

Let us know how you make out!

I did what you describe, and it works fine, with one quirky behavior: the
drive letters switch, depending upon which system I boot! The "system"
partition is always the c: drive, and the "other" partition is always the d:
drive.

Is there a way to change the boot configuration so that the partitions
always have the same label, regardless of which OS version I boot?

Steve

"Paul Knudsen" wrote:

>
> Sounds like a boot manager problem. Try this:
>
> Partition your first drive into two master partitions. (Partition
> Magic will help with this, as will most Linux distros.)
>
> Install V32 and V64 in turn. Both should be able to access your 2nd
> drive, so you can share data, but probably won't be able to "see" the
> other OS.
>
> Let us know how you make out!
>