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

[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.

[f0dder]

Installing Vista on the same drive isn't going to be that much of a problem... except for taking over the bootloader. But even if you want to remove vista later on, all you should need to do is boot to an XP recovery console and do a "fixmbr".

[Carol Haynes]

I have XP and Vista on a single drive in my laptop. Having said that I have it set to automatically boot XP on startup and I rarely bother with Vista (unless I need to look how something works for a client).

As others have said the only issue is the replacing of the boot loader. Also if you boot into Vista then the system drive is always alloacted to drive C: so your XP partition will have a different drive letter under Vista - but it doesn't really make any difference.

Before you install Vista install the XP recovery console into Windows XP that way when Vista is installed you always have a quick way to remove it if you want.

[40hz]

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.

That's what I do too. Avoids all the nonsense you can get into messing with boot managers and the MBR. 

I bit the bullet and finally got separate hard drives for everything. (I'm up to something like eight for my main workstation.)
Now my only hassle is the minor effort it takes to swap one out for the other.

[f0dder]

Carol, do you have a link to installing the recovery console? I found it once, but if you have it on hand it's faster than googling. I've found that my slipstreamed-and-nlited XP CDs don't give me the option of recovery console... so it'd be nice having it on the harddrive (less hassle anyway).

[Carol Haynes]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654/en-us

Make sure you use an original Windows XP CD to install it and make sure it is at the same service pack level (if not slipstream a new installation CD)

[nudone]

ah, thanks for that then guys. if the mbr is definitely going to be the only issue then i'll go ahead and stick vista on.

and Carol's recovery console tip is something i'd never have considered so i'll do that too.

(if you don't hear from me again you know it all went wrong and i've thrown the pc in a skip.)

[nudone]

just thought i'd do a quick reply for anyone else considering something similar to the "vista on a partion of a raid 0 drive" thing.

first two attempts didn't quite work. may have just been vista updates that ruined everything as things appeared to work for the first couple of boots.

after making a little effort to see what others had to say online, i've found this to work (for my setup)...

main drive is:

raid 0
3 partitions
1st partition (primary) = XP
2nd partition (primary) = Vista
3rd partition = data

using GAG boot loader (from a floppy for the moment) to select which partition to boot and hide the other primary partition (i have a few other drives in the machine so hiding the non required primary helps keep my drive letters in the right order).

i also loaded in the latest nforce raid drivers during the vista install - which i didn't do the first couple of times when things didn't quite work.

i haven't gone through the vista updates yet so maybe things will just grind to a halt again after that.

original reading material that helped:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/vista-and-nforce4-sataraid-an-installation-guide-vt66299.html

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/managers.html

http://gag.sourceforge.net/

if i don't mentioning anything again then the updates were successful.

[mouser]

just to mention that i've recently been considering the floppy GAG type approach and it seems like a good way to go to me. i like the idea of hiding partitions not selected, and having the bootup selector being in floppy rather than messing with boot loaders on the hd.

[nudone]

well, the GAG boot floppy certainly keeps things nice and simple. but...

not sure if i've configured the floppy correctly but once the operating system is selected, it doesn't actually continue to boot - i have to reboot (with the floppy then removed) for the complete boot process to work.

i was expecting things to work as i've seen with other boot loaders, i.e. you select the operating system to boot and the boot process continues after that - without having to restart the machine.

i know i've not enabled 'drive swap' or something on the GAG floppy so maybe it's just that.

[nudone]

something i've noticed, that i hope the more technically minded of you may understand, is that vista is a lot quieter than xp - on my machine, at least.

i've two raptor drives in a raid 0 setup. xp is on the first partition of this setup and vista is on the 2nd partition (of the same setup).

when using xp, the drives sound not unlike the handheld drilling machines that workmen use to dig holes in the road.

when using vista the drives sound almost silent.

any idea as to why?

xp has been like this from day one so i just thought it was normal for these raptor drives to make a horrible noise.

[Carol Haynes]

Maybe the Vista partition isn't as fragmented yet?

Maybe a disc has minute imperfections and a head is making a slight contact.

Maybe a bearing is going and the discs are better balanced when the heads are moving across the Vista partition.

I have 7 WD Caviar drives - two are noisy and rest are quiet - go figure! (All say they are fine according to SMART monitoring)

[nudone]

i suppose it could be a mechanical thing.

i don't think it's anything to do with fragmentation as the noise was there from the first installation of xp, 3 years ago.

i do wonder if it's the position of the partition - i was hoping it might just be that vista behaves itself better. i know that raptor drives were always considered to be noiser than a typical 7200rpm drive so i just accepted the machine gun fire sound that they make - just that the sound ain't there with vista.