"another" Dual Boot thread!!

Ello people!

I recently got a Dell m4400. Very nice machine but some of my apps and ext. hardware isn't ready for Vista 64 so i needed to have XP aswell

Yesterday i formatted my whole HDD, installed XP updates, drivers everything. Worked fine. I did have to set SATA operation to ATA otherwise the XP setup wouldn't run. After installing the ACHI drivers for XP i switched the SATA back again in the BIOS.

Then continued to install Vista in the non-partitioned space after the C: partition where XP was. installed everything and all worked fine.

Both OS's run alongside eachother now but there are two weird things.
Both show to run in C:!! When running XP all the vista stuff is located in D: but when i run Vista it's located in C: and XP is in D:. Is this normal and could this give issues?

Also, it seems the system is performing less in XP!! It doesn't use up much resources but i noticed when i tried unraring a DVD-rar in XP it took me about 24min while in Vista it was 5min.
Could this be HDD related? Maybe in the SATA setup somewhere?

 

LPTP-LVR - yes, it is normal for for the both XP and Vista to show their boot partitions as the "C" drive - but only if XP is installed first. I have installed Vista first on a couple of occasions and the boot drive letter for XP was seen as the "D" drive when XP was booted. I don't do any video work so I can't comment intelligently on your second question.

 

Ok thx

But ehh....videowork? I just have a dvd-iso, a program rather then a movie that is compressed with winrar. Not in seperate rar files either, just one large 2,5gb .rar file. No idea why it would take that long and the only thing i could think of is the whole AHCI manual driver install thing needed for XP that could've gone wrong somehow? Although it does work, it's just not as fast as i'm used too.

 

Silly me - I assumed the term DVD would have something to do with video...I should have known better... That said, video work was a dorky choice of terms on my part!! I have given up on the whole process of trying to rip dvd's - especially since the recent dvd's we've bought have either had a digital version on the dvd or a URL and activation code to allow a digital download. From what I have seen, there isn't much difference between running a SATA hdd in sata-mode versus non-sata. From what I've seen here on NBR, IIRC, something like a 5% speed difference between the two modes. So the 5-min versus 24-min difference from Vista to XP would almost have to be something else in my opinion.

 

Just got off the phone with tech support and spoke with a very knowledgable guy this time. Discussed the issue and he said it actually COULD have to do with the SATA setting. Reports are that AHCI works a lot less with XP although they do provide drivers for it. So suggested route is to run both XP and Vista in ATA mode....vista might lose a bit but not go to the crawl XP is at now. I'll just see what is does

And very true indeed....tried DVD ripping when all that was just coming up but couldn't get it to work and never thought about it again

 

I've dual-boot Vista/XP too, and XP stays as D: when it boots, but I installed Vista first on purpose.

For AHCI mode, I've no problem in XP, have you tried the latest SATA driver directly from Intel?