2 hard drives, 2 OS - boot into both?

My gaming rig has XP with SP3 on it, and I have recently obtained a copy of Vista. My question is: If I have a main hard drive with XP, could I install Vista onto a saparate HD and be able to boot into both?

The purpose would be to test out games and other programs in Vista. I plan to still use XP primarily.

Ideally, I would like to be able to choose which HD to boot into whenever I turn my PC on - I'm guessing that would be a bios setting.

Motherboard: Asus P5N-e SLI

No. Your computer has a small amount of dedicated memory so it knows how to boot up. So it can only boot up one OS. With a Mac you can run Vista/XP while running its OS. However, thats what I was told in my MIT class. Could be completely wrong though.srbbnd

No no no. I don't intend to boot into both at the same time. I'm asking is it possible to setup a dual-boot with the Operating systems being on different hard drives, so I can flip back and forth.

I have no idea what you people do your PCs, but obvioulsy yes you can dual-boot with your proposed configuration. Just check to make sure that your partitions are primary and active.

The dual-boot process works by logic P-Tables, not hardware. So there shouldn't be a problem unless you've done something that makes it break.

No. Your computer has a small amount of dedicated memory so it knows how to boot up. So it can only boot up one OS. With a Mac you can run Vista/XP while running its OS. However, thats what I was told in my MIT class. Could be completely wrong though.srbbnd

you can boot both at once fine but you have to use a seperate program and install it within that

if you want to choose which to boot just press F12 at startup when the BIOS spalsh appears then choose what you want to boot from, you can boot from pretty much anything, i'm using this method now with XP and vista and it works fine

You can also do it with them on the same hard drives using seperate partitions

I have no idea what you people do your PCs, but obvioulsy yes you can dual-boot with your proposed configuration. Just check to make sure that your partitions are primary and active.

The dual-boot process works by logic P-Tables, not hardware. So there shouldn't be a problem unless you've done something that makes it break.

quietguy

Ok. So I'll be setting my XP partition as Primary and my Vista partition as Active. Sounds good.