Dual Boot Win XP Pro 32-bit & Win Vitsa Ultimate 64-bit on same Hard Drive?

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Dual Boot Win XP Pro 32-bit & Win Vitsa Ultimate 64-bit on same Hard Drive?

I have a Mac Pro with four HD's. One HD is running 10.5.4 and the another HD is running 10.4.11. The third HD is for Mac data storage. My fourth HD is for Windows. This fourth HD is currently running Windows XP Pro 32-bit edition (the entire drive is a single partition formatted as NTFS). Can I install Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition onto this same partition? I would like to be able to use boot camp to start into either Windows XP 32-bit or Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. I suspect that boot camp can get me as far as the Windows bootloader and then I would need to select which Windows OS to load ino???

Has anyone actually successfully performed such a dual Windows OS installation using boot camp? This boot camp installation is also available with my Parallels installation. I am concerned that changing anything with break my ability to boot into Tiger (which I can right now) or my ability to load my XP pro system using Parallels.

Obviously my reason for wanting a 64-bit Windows system is to support more memory (2GB max limit that is well documented for Windows installs using the Apple Boot Camp BIOS emulator).

Thanks,

Thomas

Mac Pro Dual Quad, Mac OS X (10.5.4), Mac Pro Dual Quad

Posted on Jul 5, 2008 8:05 AM

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Answer 1

01Bora

Level 1

4 points

Jul 8, 2008 9:25 AM in response to tpatko

I would like to see a response to this as well. I have XP and Vista and would like to see them both installed. The problem I see is that I haven't been able to create 2 logical partitions inside the Boot Camp partition. If we could do that then Windows bootloader (boot.ini) would take it from there. Of course I am just running a single drive at the moment.

As an after thought...it is typically not a great idea to install 2 Windows OS's on the same partition. However I am thinking that maybe after having XP installed run a utility like Partition Magic to resize the XP partition and create a new partition on the new space made available. Then you should be able to drop Vista on there...just a thought. Anyone out there got any thoughts on this?

Message was edited by: 01Bora

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Answer 2

Armaguy

Level 1

26 points

Jul 9, 2008 6:58 PM in response to 01Bora

01Bora wrote:

Then you should be able to drop Vista on there...just a thought.

Hmm I have to say, that's what I was trying to do with my single Xp installation:
-Create a slot for it (partitionned FAT32)
-Then "drop" (install) Xp using the normal Xp installer

The whole process without using boot camp.

It looks like your case, your Xp installation being my OS X, your Vista being my Xp.

But it really didn't work at all. When choosing a partition to install Xp on, I just don't see my FAT32 space. Instead I see the whole drive as an unknown partition (mac partition are unknown to Win).

So really Boot Camp does something else other than just partitionning, partitionning like I would do it with Disk Utility (which I did).

Any idea?

Message was edited by: Armaguy

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