Dual Boot Win XP and Vista

I have a laptop on order with a 100 gb sata 7200rpm hard drive. The other specs on my new laptop (on order):

Merom Core 2 Duo 2.16 ghz, 4mb, cache ($499 for processor if you are curious - the Yonah @ 2.16 ghz was $469 - so I thought why not upgrade)
100 gb hard drive 7200 rpm
x1600 ati
DVD+RW
1 g DDR2


My goal is to have two operating systems on it: Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista. Just as a background, I use a laptop 12 hours per day and slam my memory. So, I am going to be putting this new laptop through the paces.

My current laptop has a 60 gb hard drive. Currently I have about 11 gb in the program files folder. Windows XP folder takes up about 4 gb. I see no reason why this would decrease on my new laptop.

So, here is my current plan for splicing up the hard drive

Drive C:\ Windows XP pro
Size of C: 30gb
Drive D: Windows Vista
Size of D: 30gb
Drive H: File storage
Size of H: 40gb

So, my question is: Am I overallocating drive space to the operating systems in place? I would not mind have drive H: become 50 or 60 gb. What is your opinion? Also, can anyone think of any issues/problems due to installing 32bit Windows XP in one partition and 64bit Vista in the second one?

Thanks in advance for help on this.

 

There shouldnt be any problems, as partitions are separate and have nothin to do with eachother. Many many pple dual boot xp/2000 or xp/vista w/o any problems.

 

Thanks for the reply adinu. Looking forward to trying it out.

 

Vista will complain loudly on installation and in the system dialog and give you really bad performance (for some mysterious reason most likely related to the awful fragmentation of NTFS + the bad paging executive in Vista) if you install it to a partition of less than 40GB, just to let you know. Not that it performs all that great anyways.

I do have to add that I do use Vista as my primary OS during the week, however - it's fast enough (after the about 10 minute full boot, which should obviously be faster with a 64-bit version on a dual-core processor and 7200RPM drive) and has strong integration of the features I need. Hint: Use the latest available (preferably modded) graphics drivers - performance is really terrible with some of the older sets, at least with an nVidia card. And even still you're looking at about a 30-40% drop in 3D application performance in the switch to Vista (due to the way DirectX 10 handles older versions: in software).

 

thanks lowlymarine. I will bump up that partition to 40.

 

hmm, that's a shame. I was going to suggest reducing the size of both OS partitions, and then use a bit of trickery to make it install everything onto the data partition.

What I do is allocate ~15 GB per OS partition, and the rest to one big data partition. Then I use linkd.exe (free download from Microsoft) to link <OS partition>\Program Files and Documents & Setttings to a folder on my data partition (say, <data>\WinXP\Program Files)..
Then, everything installed on <OS partition>\Program Files or Docs & settings are really placed on the data partition instead of the OS one. The main reason I do it is for more efficient usage of my disk space. (Now all programs from all OS'es actually install applications to the same partition, so I don't risk running out of space on XP, while Vista or x64 still has tons of space free)
Also, it makes it easier to save your data when reinstalling an OS...

But if Vista needs 40GB, that's obviously a problem. Maybe you could map program files and docs & settings on both OS'es to Vista's partition then, so you have something to use those 40GB for...

 

Thanks Jalf. I have never heard of that before: linkd.exe.

I know you were mentioning this tongue in cheek, but I think I am going to try it out (I can always just reformat if this fails):

Drive C: WinXP
Size: 15 gb and "linkd" to drive D: Program Files

Drive D: Vista
Size 40 gb

Drive H: <Data partition>
Size 45 gb

Hopefully, that will optimize the storage without running into Vista's apparent storage and performance issues. I will post my results in a couple of weeks in case someone else on this forum is contemplating a similar installation.

 

I wouldn't link it to d:\program files. That's a sure way to make Vista and XP overwrite each others' programs.
Make it something like D:\WinXP\Program Files instead, so you can keep them separate

 

Glad you reminded me. I will create a winxp folder.

 

I dual boot Vista and XP on my M90 (see specs in sig). I have 80GB allocated to XP and 20 to Vista and I haven't noticed any probems at all with Vista. Maybe it's the Core Duo and the 7200 RPM hard drive that makes the difference, but Vista actually runs faster on my computer than XP. Just my thoughts.

 

yeah, the 40GB thing sounded really weird to me, but I haven't tested it myself, so figured it was best to just assume it's true.

 

ftw, you have quite a similar setup to me. So, I might experiment with a 20 gb partition.

So, my first try at this will be:

c: Win xp
size: 15 gb

d: Vista
size: 20 gb

h: data
size 65 gb
linked
Winxp\program files
Vista\program files

Thanks for all of the posts.

 

Oh yeah, you'll probably have to swap OS'es a fair bit to get it set up. (XP doesn't like it if you go around moving its system folders, so you should probably boot into Vista before trying to link XP's folders, and vice versa.

And because of NTFS's crappy support for this, try to make sure drive letters are the same in both OS'es.

Anyway, good luck.