I have vista ultimate installed on a spare drive that I use just for testing.

At the moment I have to disconnect the cable and power supply from this drive and re-connect my xp drive to use one or the other .

Can I put this drive into the pc and then connect both drives together on the same cable and use either to boot from.

I think I would need a new boot.ini file but how to write one manually without re installing or changing any software.

And if it can be done which boot.ini to change the one on the xp drive or the one on the vista drive or both?

Any help appreciated .

You can try this:

http://gag.sourceforge.net/

Looks interesting but I cannot see anywhere that it supports vista?

And how do I use it?

Do I install first on xp drive and then turn off computer and attach cables to vista drive and turn on and hope for the best.

If it starts fine but if not then what??

I'm getting cold feet

Any further assistance/assurances appreciated

After it is installed it works completely independent of any operating system. It becomes the first boot device and then you go where you want from it.

As mentioned it will also fit on a floppy and in that case you just boot the floppy. Try that first and if you like it put it on the Master drive. Or just always boot the floppy.

Originally Posted by jephree

After it is installed it works completely independent of any operating system. It becomes the first boot device and then you go where you want from it.

As mentioned it will also fit on a floppy and in that case you just boot the floppy. Try that first and if you like it put it on the Master drive. Or just always boot the floppy.

Tried using the floppy method.

Connected botth xp & vista drives followed instructions but got all sorts of deadly messages and I thought I caused chaos.

Finally unplugged vista drive from cable and rebooted with xp drive and system came back.

Don't know if I did it right or not but it scared me off for now

Couldn't make it work .

Are the jumpers set to Master and slave?

Does the BIOS see both drives?

Originally Posted by jephree

Are the jumpers set to Master and slave?

Does the BIOS see both drives?

No jumpers in either harddrive.

Yes both drives are visible when I set boot priority in the bios screen.

You should have jumpers set. The best is Master/slave or you can go with Cable Select on both.

Originally Posted by jephree

You should have jumpers set. The best is Master/slave or you can go with Cable Select on both.

Which should be master and which slave??

If your drive with XP is primary to you then set it as master and the other as slave.

Another approach is set the XP to Primary Master and the Vista to Secondary Master moving your DVD/CD to secondary or Primary slave.

Either way the BIOS needs to detect these distinctions and I think that may be your issue. Many BIOS' will show their own boot manager if they detect multiple boot drives.