topic Re: Dual booting AR21S in PCs & Accessories

Dual booting AR21S

jumbles1971 — Tue, 08 May 2007 21:38:46 GMT

How easy (if at all possible) would it be to dual boot an AR21S with XP and Vista. It comes with XP pre-installed and I have the Vista Express Upgrade disc. I want Vista for a few features - mainly Movie Maker and DVD Maker - and also to just play around with some of the other cool bits and pieces but I want XP as my main OS until at least Vista SP1.

I thought something along the lines of...

XP on a large C: drive
Vista on a small 😧 drive
and have the rest as the E: drive for recording TV and other stuff.

Would it work and if so, does anyone know how to do it?

thanks
Jumbles

Re: Dual booting AR21S

a7med_360 — Tue, 08 May 2007 23:41:25 GMT

ive been searching the net to do this but havent find any article on it.
someone plzzzzz tell us how to do this

Re: Dual booting AR21S

Sirnig — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:53:45 GMT

ive been searching the net to do this but havent find any article on it.
someone plzzzzz tell us how to do this

...all you ever wanted to know about dual-booting VISTA and more to be found here :- http://www.tweakhound.com/vista/installguide.htm
Note the author's warning at point 4 about VISTAs booting (mis?)behaviour. Have fun all you masochists

Re: Dual booting AR21S

jumbles1971 — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:22:25 GMT

I was bored this afternoon so I decided to give it a go and to hell with the consequences. I now have XP and Vista installed on the same computer and no major problems so far! The only thing I've noticed is the slightly bizarre drive letter order under Vista.

If anyone wants to give it a go it's pretty simple. All I did was dig out some partitioning software (Partition Magic 8 in this case though I believe there's freeware out there) and shrink the C: drive (with XP on it) by 10GB and the 😧 drive by 10GB then moved the 😧 drive so there was 20GB of unallocated space in the middle. I stuck the Vista DVD in; rebooted and installed it to the 20GB of unallocated space leaving the other two drives untouched. Then I installed the drivers and applications.

When it boots, I get the option to boot into Vista or an Earlier Version Of Windows.

The only thing I can think of that I'd do differently would be to make the Vista Partition 10GB larger just so there's a little bit more room for it to breathe (and install Halo 2).