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Converting dual boot Vista and XP to BIOS Boot Menu

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Converting dual boot Vista and XP to BIOS Boot Menu

Postby Haybarn » Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:12 pm

I have Vista Business and XP Pro on separate drives, with Vista acting as the boot manager for both. Each drive is dedicated to OS and Apps only, and copies of backup Images for other partitions. All data including frequent images made with Image for DOS reside on separate Sata drives. Outlook for example, using either XP or Vista, saves to the same data file.

The XP Drive is C, on IDE. Vista is on Drive K, a RAID 0 array of two Raptor Satas. Vista Disk Manager shows the following:

- WinXP (C) is NTFS, Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition).
- Vista (K) is NTFS, Healthy (Boot, Crash Dump. Active, Primary Partition).

I had great success a few months ago using the motherboard BIOS's built-in boot menu to go back and forth between XP Pro and Vista RC1. It kept each drive independent.

I do not like, or trust, the current setup's dependence of each OS on boot files stored on only the Vista drive. I wish I had done the clean install of Vista with the XP drive disconnected. Other than starting all over, is there a way for me to restore the XP boot files to the XP drive C? It looks like I can use VistaPro to delete the dual boot functionality of Vista on Drive K. If I could hide each OS partition from the other, it would also make updates and patches easier. For example 3DMark06 and some other updates look only at C for the existing program they will patch.
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Postby NT50 » Tue Mar 06, 2007 12:05 am

Yes

You can use VistaBootPro to remove the boot manager of Vista when you are booted in XP.

If you wish to remove ALL evidence of Vista boot then I will look for the total removal of it but what files are left behind to not hurt anything.
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