Dual Booting Option?

good day everyone.
I like to try this dual booting stuff (vista to xp) and i already read some guide regarding this. I want to know if something went wrong in dong this, say cannot boot from xp or vista, or any other problem. Can i just use the recovery option just to get back to my original factory setting

My Note Book
Acer Aspire 5102AWLMi
AMD Turion 64 M-38 (2.2 GHz, 512KB L2 cache)
Up to 384MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 HyperMemory
120GB HDD 5400rpm
2GB DDR2

Thanks in advance :smile:

 

Yes, if the computer boots and the cdrom works, then you can access the Acer Recovery and restore your computer.

 

many thanks for your superfast reply, btw what do you mean if the computer boots or cdrom works, thus this mean when i power up my computer then i will see the acer logo then i can press alt+F10.

 

The recovery disk will NOT undo any Partition changes that you have made. It will just load the recovery OS back into the C: partition.

Doing a recovery will not erase an OS or info in other partitions. You might still be Dual booting after a recovery.

So if you want it back EXACTLY the way it was, you will have to delete the Partition you put the extra OS on and resize or make Partitions how they were before.

I recommend using G-parted and read more up on Dual Booting before you jump in to it.

 

thanks LIVEFRMNYC, what are the chances of bricking my notebook or any part of it in doing this Dual Booting Option? Can you point to a direction where can follow a good guide regarding Dual booting?

thanks again.

 

The worse you can do is mess up content on drive and maybe lose the abiltly to disk to disk recovery the alt f10 one but if you burned set backup disk and test them you fine worse you can do lose recovery partions

 

Yup, like andyasselin said.

Backing up important files is key. There is a chance you can wipe out your whole drive if you make a mistake. Then you would have to reload your OS.
Not likely but it happens.

I would suggest you go over to the Linux forums, many including myself have made how to post on Dual Booting.

It's pretty easy, all you need to do is make another partition and point the OS install to it.

I use Gparted to make partitions. Make the partiton NTFS since you are dual booting Windows.

 

thanks guys,

 

another question can i use vista to make another partion

 

Only thing with this is if he sets up dual boot as xp on the c: or vista.

Depending on what boot file is read first, if you did a format/repair on the c: and its your prime OS then it would not be dual boot anymore becasue it would have a stock boot file again (not vista it will find the other install I think, but xp wont) so you would be in XP as normal just with 2 drives (partitions) but you can still use the other partion as normal with no ill effects.

Im semi familar with this as I just got done seting up a dual boot system the other day. Xp was on there but with a bad boot.ini file so when I installed vista on my V: it took over and booted directly into vista with no option for dual boot.

I had to manually repair the boot.ini for xp with recovery mode and it still went straight to vista, so I had to manually add the xp boot info to its boot file and finaly I was able to do everything right (and got to customize it alot aswell)

Strange that I used partition magic to shrink my xp partition to install vista, I chose to make xp C: and vista V:... in XP I see just that under my computer C & V

But in vista I see C: and D: with C: being the vista install and D: being the real C: with xp on it.

So dont let that confuse you seems vista like to think of what ever partitoin its on as C: reguardess of what its actually assigned.

 

Yea, that how Windows is. It has differ letter drives within the OS. C: will always be Windows default. You can have Vista as C: within Vista, and XP as C: within XP.

As far as the windows boot file, I haven't had any trouble with that so far. Maybe it has to do with the order of installed Windows (XP,Vista or Vista,XP) and the getting rid of the last one you installed might be the problem with boot.

 

seems like i having trouble installing xp pro, already configure to boot xp from cd/dvd on bios but still no luck, any suggestion,

 

Here is a good guide I did mine with:
http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp

 

thanks m8, but i already look at that guide, my problem is whenever i try to boot from cd/dvd the machine wont do that, instead it go straight to vista?
as i have said i already configure my machine in bios to boot from cd/dvd

 

oh I have had that happen before... instead of just configureing your machine to boot from cd/dvd first.

Try to configure it to cd/dvd ONLY as in actully remove the boot from hdd from the list for some reason it reads the cd/dvd and then decides to boot from the hdd.

If you do what I said it should force it to read the dvd/cd and then give you a prompt on screen that says "to boot from cd/dvd press any key now" from there you should be well on your way.

Let me know if it works.

 

how do i remove the hdd booting from the list?

 

depends on your bios.

Mine gives me a list.

first boot device
second boot device
third boot device

and for each one I can set what ever device I want to use... usb, hdd, optical drive, or none.

So I can set optical drive as first boot device and device 2 and 3 as "none" and its forced to use the optical and wont orveride with an auto hard disk boot if you dont have the lightening reflexes to hit the key to boot from cd/dvd.

 

still cannot install xp on my laptop, do you think i need a sata driver and slipstream to my xp pro cd. does acer 5102 does not have a sata/raid driver.