dual boot wxp 32 & 64bit?

[Alex]

im running regular wxp pro on my athlon64 and just saw a wxp64bit thread that interested me... i'd like to try it out... i'd like to have a dual boot with both OSes is that easily doable? do i need to tweak around or will the installation deal with my mbr properly without fsckiung a anuthing up... (i also have mandiva le2005 installed)

 

[Nanobaud]

XP64 seems to love dual boot. I was going to install it on a fresh HD and select what to boot by selecting primary disk in the BIOS. I switched the blank HD to primary boot target, booted from the XP64 CDROM and directed XP64 to do a fresh install on the unformatted drive. During install, it still found the XP32 drive and set-up dual boot from that drive (or direct boot from the new XP64 drive). In order to get it to not set-upp dual boot (since I am not comfortable manually cleaning-up boot loaders), I had to start over and physically disconnect the XP32 HD during XP64 install.

nBd

 

[Alex]

awesome thanks maybe when there's more 64bit stuff out there i'll give it a shot!

 

[MajorPayne]

Nanobaud had it ABSOLUTELY correct, in that a BIOS-based dual-boot system is the best when you are testing a new OS. I cannot count the number of times that I have heard people complain that they set up a dual boot, wiped one of the OS', and then lost everything.... It is really quite simple too, just disconnect the original hard drive before you install XP-64 to the new one. When you are done installing XP-64 to the new one, shut down, reconnect the XP-32 drive, and then just pick in BIOS which hard drive boots first. I much prefer this to the Windows Boot Prompt, since I may only want to go to the testing OS every other day or so, or I may want to stay there for days at a time. This way, you only need to worry about switching over when you are ready to do so, and no need to untangle the boot listing for either one.

 

[rkoenn]

Although MS tends to indicate it will not, it will as others here have indicated. A couple of suggestions, take a look at the brief report on ExtremeTech today about XP 64. They talk about the requirements and make suggestions. Probably the most important is to install it on a second drive, not on your primary partition along with 32 bit XP. If you do install on the existing partition you will run into all kinds or problems with your apps and other things all trying to install into the same common directory structure. I installed the beta on a secondary 60 SATA drive in my system and actually use the BIOS setup for deciding on which to boot. A little kludgy and slower but it isolates them completely. My primary is a performance SATA RAID pair and 32 bit is on it.