Dual booting Vista and Vista

[Abhik262]

Hi, after having bought 4GB Ram, I felt that it would be worth giving 64 bit a try and thus decided to initially try a dual boot of vista 32 and 64 bit. I already have 32 bit Vista installed on my primary 320GB HDD and would like to install 64 bit Vista on a 60 GB partition on my secondary hard drive. I have acquired the necesarry licenses to legally be able to install and run both versions at the same time. What would be the necessary steps to make this work?

I also read somehwere that the dual boot menu labels both 64 bit and 32 bit vista as "Windows Vista". If this is so, what can i do to change atleast one of the options on the menu? Thanks in advance for any help. My PC specs can be found near my username on this post. Thanks again.

[streetster]

Vista gets rid of the legacy 'boot.ini' file, and so in order to make changes to the system startup, you can use a program called 'bcdedit' (start->run->cmd-> bcdedit /? to get a list of available commands).

However, despite having a google and reading through the microsoft help page, I couldn't get anywhere with it, and, luckily, someone has created a user-friendly GUI based app so you can modify your boot settings within vista.

It's called 'EasyBCD' and you can get it - here

[Numenor]

Hi, after having bought 4GB Ram, I felt that it would be worth giving 64 bit a try and thus decided to initially try a dual boot of vista 32 and 64 bit. I already have 32 bit Vista installed on my primary 320GB HDD and would like to install 64 bit Vista on a 60 GB partition on my secondary hard drive. I have acquired the necesarry licenses to legally be able to install and run both versions at the same time. What would be the necessary steps to make this work?

I also read somehwere that the dual boot menu labels both 64 bit and 32 bit vista as "Windows Vista". If this is so, what can i do to change atleast one of the options on the menu? Thanks in advance for any help. My PC specs can be found near my username on this post. Thanks again.

Given you have two hard drives, you could swap the boot order in the BIOS so that it boots from the second disk, and install Vista 64 bit on that. Obviously make sure you select the correct partition to install to or you'll end up erasing a load of data.

Then when you want to boot into 32 bit again, swap the boot order back. It's a little bit tedious if you want to frequently switch between the two, but if you're trying out 64 bit for compatibility and might eventually decide to stay on it for good, it should be fine.

[Abhik262]

Given you have two hard drives, you could swap the boot order in the BIOS so that it boots from the second disk, and install Vista 64 bit on that. Obviously make sure you select the correct partition to install to or you'll end up erasing a load of data.

Then when you want to boot into 32 bit again, swap the boot order back. It's a little bit tedious if you want to frequently switch between the two, but if you're trying out 64 bit for compatibility and might eventually decide to stay on it for good, it should be fine.

This is what I originally had in mind as the advantage with this is that i would have a faster boot time in whatever OS i choose (something i very much need) and i guess i will stick with it. I dont find this sort of thing tedious as i will only initially use 64 bit to play some games and see if my other 64 bit supporting apps provide a real difference in terms of performance.

I have run into an issue though. I am using Vista's Partition utility thing (the one where you right click on the "computer" on the start menu, click manage and then go to disk management) and the issue i have is that i want to create a 60GB partition on my secondary hard drive (initially) and then choose wether or not i want to keep it and then make it a bit bigger but when i try to shrink the partition, i get the dialogue box which asked me by how much i want to shrink it by (61440 Mb) but when i click OK i get and error message which reads "acess denied". I tried doing this as the super administrator as well as a regular administrator, yet i still get the same results. What can i do here?

[Abhik262]

Ok, dont worry, i solved the issue by moving all of my stuff to another place, after which i deleted the existing partition and then made 2 new partitions. thanks for the help.