Dual Boot WinXP Pro w/Vs2003 & Vista x64 w/ Vs2005

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Hello,

Am I a bit deranged to want to dual boot a system as:

a) Windows XP Pro (32-bit) w/ VS2003 + IVF 9.1 (currently installed)

b) Windows Vista (64-bit) w/VS2005 + IVF 9.1

The system has removable drive trays so I can physically swap disks. That might be the safest route to take but not the easiest (forgoing trashing with attempt with dual boot).

I have used multi-boot successfully before. Generally by placing the separate O/S on a separate disk and/or partition. As Windows evolved this seemed to get worse and worse. e.g. the volume tracking of each booted version of the O/S wants to control the volume information setup by the other version of the O/S. Another complication is, depending if you are not careful during install the 2nd O/S will boot as D:. Which by itself wouldn't be so bad if additionally installed software wouldn't look for C:Program Files or C:Windows first.

If I could learn from someone else's experience I would be grateful.

Jim Dempsey

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I do this sort of thing a lot. The key is that the drive letters assigned by the BIOS match what Windows expects. On my system, the primary drive has C and boots XP. A removeable drive comes up as G and boots Vista. Using the boot menu, I can select among these. It's ok to pull the removeable drive and boot C.

Note that VS and Intel Fortran don't really care, but you want to avoid changing the drive letter ofthe boot partitionout from under Windows.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Please comment on this further.

Your system has a fixed drive (partitioned up the wazoo) and a removable drive.

You have WinXP on the fixed drive. (discuss installation later)

You have Win Vista on the removable drive.

You set the BIOS boot sequence to (perhaps)

FD, CD, Removable, Fixed

Ignore FD and CD for the moment

If you boot with the removable driveremoved then the fixed drive boots WinXP on C:

If you boot with the removable drive installed then the removable drive boots Vista and sees Vista on C: and also sees WinXP on some other drive letter(s), perhaps after the CD/DVD drive letters.

When you installed Vista, did you unplug the power on the fixed drive?

i.e. boot to FD then installed Vistavia CD->blank hd on removable.
or boot Vista installation CD and install in blank hd on removable

Because if you booted FD with boot sequence "FD, CD, Removable, Fixed" and with both drives installed but with non-boot partitioned removable then the fixd drive would boot as C: and you get hosed with Vista installing on G:.

I have Vista comming, may be here tomorrow or Monday. I have a spare blank removable HD (primary drive is removable too). I would like to be able to see the "other disk" regardless of which I boot. But I could live with having an O/S disk and a development disk.

Your recommendations will be welocomed

Jim

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The boot order is irrelevant - the BIOS assigns drive letters in the order it sees the partitions, and from my experience, the only influence you have is to disable the BIOS recognition of the drive. The order considers what connection is used, whether the drive is "bootable", etc. I'm sure there's a good explanation of this out on the web somewhere.

Once I did disable the fixed drive so that only the removeable was seen. The BIOS then treated the removeable as C. However, when Windows booted, it saw the fixed drive anyway (this is still something that puzzles me) and assigned it a higher leter. I was relieved to find that if I restored the BIOS recognition of the fixed drive and rebooted into XP there, it was unaffected by the temporary letter reassignment. (Of course, my Vista install on the removeable was then now on a different letter, but I didn't care as I was going to wipe it anyway.)

I have no problem with seeing the other disk, though Windows will sometimes prevent you from accessing some of the folder trees on the other disk due to NTFS permissions, even with administrator privs I found. It should be no problem to have Vista install on the removeable disk - when you boot, you'll get the Vista boot menu that allows you to boot from a "previous operating system". If you pull the drive, then you'll get the normal XP boot. Drive letters will be consistent no matter which OS you boot.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Steve,

I have in the past had my varioussystems over 35 years of programmingsetup to multi-bootseveral different Operating systems and versions DOS, Win3.1, OS2, Win95, Win 95OSR2, (skipped Win ME), NT4, Win2000, Win2003, WinXP. I had problems with WinXP.Prior to WinXP this went relatively smoothly using NTLDR.

When I started using WinXP I got the system tangled up where WinXP installed on a drive other than C: and with my CD ROM drives sandwiched between hard drives. This happened because I added a blank hard drive and then did the WinXP install while running the prior version of Windows.Other than looking goofy it didn't bother me so much until one of the CD drives died then WinXP got snafu-d. I wasted about 3 days untangling that mess and I would like to avoid a repeat of that problem.

Additional problems I had were Windows ran OK on the other drive but some of the 3rd party programs didn't use the environment variables:

SystemDrive
SystemRoot
ProgramFiles
windir

to locate where the booted system folders were located. Of particular annoyance is when Visual Studio or the SDK, MSDN etc.. gets whacked on the other boot environment e.g. booting to E:Windows and whacking C:Program Files...

To fix that required un-installing the tools from the affected operating systems then re-installing (and installing all the patch levels, etc...).

I would like to avoid this when I install Vista.

My current system, at least the one I want to install Vista on, has two 200GB hard drives each with one NTFS partition. The 1st drive boots WinXP Pro (32-bit). I purchased a 3rd drive, 160GB. All drives are in removable drive trays.

Ideally, I would like to install WinXP Pro 64-bit on the 2nd hard drive making a dual boot between the different bitted WinXP Pro's. Then install Vista on the 3rd hard drive. Thus producing a triple boot system. I don't mind installing VS and IVF three times (two more times). I would prefer that applications that I develop remain in one set of folders which are used regardless of the boot environment.

Also, I was thinking of keeping VS2003 on the WinXP Pro and using VS2005 on WinXP Pro x64, and Vista. Other than for disk space do you see a problem with this?

Jim Dempsey

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I routinely install XP (and now Vista) on drives other than C: and have no problems.Until recently, my main home system was runningXP as H:. My home test system hasfour different Windows variants on various partitions (C, F, G, H) and I canselectamong them using the standard Windows boot loader. I also see no issue with using different VS versions in your different OS environments.. Heck, I have four different VS versions installed on my office system (XP) and they all are usable independently.

I have seen some software products (even our own) have minor issues when Windows is not booted from C due to not using the API calls to get the proper paths. We fixed the issues with our products and the others I have managed to deal with easily enough.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Steve,

Progress report

As long as I was performing a major install, I thought it would be a good time to update my motherboard BIOS, I have an issue where one of the fans doesn't show up in the health monitor. No biggie. Any who... the dang FD quit working. So I had no DOS boot environment to flash the BIOS. I can build a DOS bootable CD with the new BIOS, but I think it would be prudent to save a copy of the current BIOS first. Saving to RAMDISK isn't what I had in mind.

Since the VS2005 Pro + MSDN Pro didn't ship with WinXP Pro X64 and Vista I wanted to get something done with an otherwise wasted day. So I decide to bite the bullitt and un-install VS2003 .NET and the older MSDN. Also uninstalled the IVF VS integrations (before uninstalling VS2003). The install of VS2005 went well, too a while including the 43 critical updates over the internet. Then I tried to install the IVF VS integrations. Running the setup didn't do that. So uninstall IVF, reinstall IVF and that worked. I built my app,the IVFfiles compiled OK, had one line in a CPP that balked (supprised it passed the compiler on VS2003). Now Ihave to figure out what this #manifest thing is about.

One question I have (for now):

During installation IVF queried if it should use "...MicrosofPlatform SDK"

Well VS2005 installs without installing Platform SDK.

Is this going to present a problem?

In my prior subscription to VS2003 Pro and MSDN Platform SDK came with it and so did the Operating systems. When I authorized MSDN over the internet the websit stated that MS would ship a set of DVD's to me (7-10 business days). In addition to updates would you know if Platform SDK and Operating Systems ship with the set of DVDs? Or is Platform SDK now out of date.

Jim Dempsey

[Steven_L_Intel1]

When you install the IA-32 compiler, this also tries to install the Itanium cross-compiler which needs a PSDK with Itanium support. VS2005 includes a PSDK but for IA-32 and "AMD64" only, unless you spring for the Team System Edition. So when you get that prompt, just check the box to not install the Itanium compiler and you'll be all set.

My past experience from having a DVD subscription to MSDN (I now have download only) is that you will get a PSDK, but you don't need it if you have VS2005 (again, unless you want to compile for Itanium.)