Dual Boot Install

...and this is only the pre-beta...lots more to come I'm sure.

Johnnylane said:

Are you saying that the two OS's should be on the same HDD?

Nope - I am saying I have not tried that scenario before so I cannot say one way or another what the results will be.

I will also add that having them on separate physical HDs *makes sense*.

Well, perhaps yes and perhaps no - you may have issues if you just disconnect it as I am pretty sure that the W7 boot manager will cry foul when it only sees your current Vista install and not the other references....

Johnnylane said:

Well, the basic idea is, if things get away from me, push-comes-to-shove, I could just unplug the drive.

Well I had been wondering the same thing. Sooooo. I unplugged tower, unplugged the second drive and booted up. At post I got a warning that a disk drive was not detected. press F1 to continue and F12 for diagnostics. I pressed F1 and the dual boot options came up. I selected Vista and here I am.

I take it that this means that the MBR is on the Vista OS partition even though I installed 7 second. I did not make the 7 partition active before I installed so maybe that's why.

This does not mean it will work for anyone else. Just means I did something right without knowing it when I installed 7.

Be back in a few when I get this thing put back together.

Gary

Update:Everything is as it was.

Yeah, the MBR is still on your active drive - but if this changes in the future?

After all, this is a pre-Beta build, so it is expected to be put on second partitions or second drives without hosing the original drive.

My concern is for the future....if this changes, then.....you get issues like where if you install *nix after XP, and it installs GRUB, and then you kill *nix, and GRUB ceases to function because the boot partition in Linux no longer exists, and you have to repair the XP install to get it to boot...