Vista Beta 2 and XP - dual boot? EDIT! Drive died :( possible to remove boot loader??

[Sparky]

OK I'm jumping on the vista beta 2 bandwagon :D only question I have is dual booting. I've heard some people had issues dual booting vista and XP because vista "took over" or something, and others said they had no trouble. I don't want to just plunge to vista totally right now so I want my current XP pro install all there. I have 2 separate hard drives (250GB with winXP on it, empty 60GB to use for vista) so that isn't a problem.

*EDIT*
well I installed vista on a 60GB WD drive I had and dual-booted my computer, however good ol' WD did it to me again - drive just randomly died and took vista with it. It booted up (which took forever which I thought was odd) then when I tried to do something it locked up so I punched the reset button. In windows XP it came up and said "drive F: needs to be checked for consistency" - uh oh - and it found thousands of irrecoverable sectors. I finally just quit it and pulled the drive out of the system. That drive had an obnoxious whine to it compared to my silent samsung drive anyway....

So now I have a dual OS boot screen but only one OS. Any way to get rid of the vista boot loader?

[Azh_fx]

ive used vista and xp dual in a dual boot. ive got rid of vista eventually as it was qite buggy for me.

[TyroPyro]

Just don't choose to upgrade XP. Have a partition or second hard drive ready before you install Vista. I elected to put it on a separate physical drive, just in case Vista went nuts :) No problems with it affecting my XP Pro install though.

[Spyvie]

I first installed Vista x64 with XP Home in dual boot, separate partitions on the same drive. I gave up on x64… too slow and buggy. Then I setup x86 Vista/XP Home and I’m pretty happy with it. MS update released 6 bug fixes late last week and while it’s not perfect, it runs pretty smooth on my nF3 box.

I’m running Quake 4 and the Prey demo in x86 on my crappy 6600GT just fine, I haven’t booted into XP for a couple of days.

Just give Vista at least a 30GB partition and install XP first.

[Sparky]

well I installed vista on a 60GB WD drive I had and dual-booted my computer, however good ol' WD did it to me again - drive just randomly died and took vista with it. It booted up (which took forever which I thought was odd) then when I tried to do something it locked up so I punched the reset button. In windows XP it came up and said "drive F: needs to be checked for consistency" - uh oh :( - and it found thousands of irrecoverable sectors. I finally just quit it and pulled the drive out of the system. That drive had an obnoxious whine to it compared to my silent samsung drive anyway....

So now I have a dual OS boot screen but only one OS. Any way to get rid of the vista boot loader? :confused:

[cronic]

Maybe this will help?

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

[Sparky]

Maybe this will help?

http://www.vistabootpro.org/
thanks, looks good! I'll update once I use it to see if it does what I need

[simonmaltby]

I found that it worked ok on dual boot, but using a different HD for Vista was less problematic rather than a different partition on the same hard drive.

[couppi]

Maybe delete the vista line in the boot.ini file.

Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl, and then click OK.
On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
Under System Startup, click Edit.
Just delete the line with Vista in it and it'll be good.