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[rainman1962 Profile]

For whatever reason I thought I was going to need XP more than I have since discovered. I am considering either partitioning my XP drive or eliminating the dual boot altogether.

Currently I have 2 physical hard drives with Vista on 0 and XP on 1. The first thing I would like to try is adding a partition to the XP drive. Would I simply physically disconnect the Vista drive, boot with my partition software, make my new partition and then reconnect Vista?

As a second option, if I wanted to simply scrap XP altogether would I run VBP in Vista, navigate to BCD OS Entries and just delete the XP entry? Would this eliminate the dual boot menu? An unrelated question, how then would I reformat the old XP drive without putting an OS on it. I would just use it as a second drive for Vista?

A third option is to reformat the XP drive (I am having some really weird network issues and I am about to loose it...rather than that I thought I might just reformat the XP drive). Again, would I just disconnect the Vista drive, boot with XP and then reconnect the drive? Shouldn't I get the dual boot menu without any further action as the boot info is stored on Vista?

I am kind of a newbie to all of this so I apologize in advance if my suggestions are off the mark.

Thanks
Jeff

[NT50 Profile]

1. You could shrink the partition
2. Yes use VistaBootPro in Vista and remove the entry and then format the drive

You should not have to disconnect the driver at all

[rainman1962 Profile]

But if I want to reformat XP, don't I need to disconnect Vista? This is what you had me do when I originally installed XP on drive 1.

[NT50 Profile]

You do not have to disconnect.

[rainman1962 Profile]

I guess where my confusion lies is how does the XP setup know which drive to put XP on if both drives are plugged in? What is stopping XP from overwriting Vista? Is it the Boot order in the BIOS that determines this? If this is the case, both my drives are EXACTLY the same so I cannot tell which is which.

[Grav!ty Profile]

I guess where my confusion lies is how does the XP setup know which drive to put XP on if both drives are plugged in? What is stopping XP from overwriting Vista? Is it the Boot order in the BIOS that determines this? If this is the case, both my drives are EXACTLY the same so I cannot tell which is which.

If you name your drives, you'll be able to see which is which. Also, if you pre-create a partition and pre-format it you'll be able to see by the amount of disk space available which is the drive to install on.