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keep xp, put vista on 2nd partition on a raid 0 drive - will i regret it?

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nudone:
i know this is lazy of me to ask, and i've procrastinated for several months over this...

will i regret installing vista onto a 2nd partition of a raid 0 drive? i want to keep xp on the first partition (of the same raid 0 drive) and then gradually see if i can stick with vista and forget xp. well, that's the theory.

i know vista will install alongside xp but vista worries me about how it appears to take control of everything, so i'm concerned that this will lead to problems if i wish to remove vista and just stick with xp.

like, err, is vista going to go mental if removing it from a 2nd partition on a raid 0 drive - or am i just being paranoid?

anyone know for sure?

justice:
In the situation of non-raid 2 harddrives with XP installed on disk 1 and vista on disk 2:
Vista will install its own bootloader on disk 1 and bootfiles on disk 2 and you will now require both harddisks to be available to boot into vista, if you want to get rid of it later you will have to go to the windows xp recovery console and fixmbr & fixboot

Don't have any experience of Raid 0 so not sure how that affects it.

Also any of the files created by vista will have permissions set to the vista system, with another installation I cannot get rid of the Windows and Program Files folder and I had to take ownership of my vista created folders.

nudone:
thanks, justice.

it's the raid thing that i'm worried about. i'd normally just dive straight in and see what happens, with a bit of an assumption it's not going to be a problem anyway - but it's vista so i believe (perhaps pessimistically) that anything could happen.

mouser:
what i love for these occasions is to get a hard drive rack and a spare hard drive, and just swap it in when you want to boot with an alternative OS.

nudone:
i did consider that. i even bought the hard drive to do it with (which is now in the machine and just full of data instead).

i didn't do it because i still wasn't confident about what could happen. the problem is, currently, xp is installed across two drives that are in raid 0. so they aren't really convenient to swap out. i did consider just removing their cables but that isn't convenient either as i'll have to keep going inside the machine to do it. it also means that i'd be losing the advantage of having raid 0 when they are disconnected - maybe that would be hardly noticeable.

so, i thought, i could perhaps leave the cables connected and just disable things in the bios. i've had machines in the past where i'd dual boot between two drives by disabling one or the other in the bios. BUT, it's vista again, and i don't know how happy it would be if i tried this sort of dual boot disabling a drive arrangement.

i say that as i know i've had xp see drives that were disabled in the bios. i can't remember when it was and what happened but i distinctly recall wondering how it could do that - i think i used it to to my advantage by accessing files that were on the disabled drive. (okay, maybe what i described was something more to do with the hardware at the time rather than xp being too clever - or i just don't get how a bios really works, so it doesn't really disable things when it says it has).

anyhow, it's vista, so i'm inclined to think if xp could do that, then vista will probably do something even more weird, i.e. it will try and take over the drive that is meant to be disabled in the bios, and it will mess things up somehow.

if i wasn't using the raid 0 drive(s) then i'd do the simple swap over of a drive with xp and a drive with vista. but it really isn't practical right now. i've been using this xp installation for 3 years without a reinstall so i really don't want to give it up yet as it works perfectly - so that means keeping the raid 0 setup.

if anyone knows for sure that i can disable the raid drive (or disconnect them) and then install vista on it's own drive and then reconnect everything and then dual boot using the bios method then i'll do that.

in other words, if vista isn't going to eat my raid drive as soon as it sees it then i'll try it. i'd prefer to do this hard drive swap method rather than install vista on a second partition, i'm just suspicious it won't be that simple.

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