dual boot W10/vista

[pleng87845]

I have an old program(business) which only works in XP or Vista so i installed VISTA PRO from a disc on my older (12y old) PC E-Machine AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 6gb RAM with 2 HDs and Windows10(originaly W7). Vista was instelled on the second HD (500 gb) W10 was on the first HD(2TB). Vista PRO Insallation was perfect and after SP2 installation everything worked fine including my old program too. Unfortunately the dual booting doesn't work as i expected. It only boots in Vista even if i go to F12 and enter in the boot seq. menu indicating booting from my first HD it will allways boot from the second HD where Vista is located. I red that if you install and older OS after W10 even if it is installed on a different HD it will change the MBR and you can't boot in to your W10 OS even if that is not on the same drive. What should i do? I am sure there must be a fix for this problem.

 

[Scott]

Starting from scratch the way I always recommend doing this is install whichever primary OS onto whichever drive with all other drives disconnected. Once complete, disconnect this drive and connect the secondary drive for the secondary OS and install.

That way you can use the BIOS boot option to select the drive and they have completely independent MBRs.

In your case, if you want to try and fix the situation, disconnect the drives one at a time and see if they boot. Vista may but I doubt Win10 will. Once you find the problem OS repair the MBR. With the second drive disconnected if Vista fails to boot as well you can use the repair tools to sort that as well.

For me, if you don't have anything important at this moment......... wipe the lot and start clean.

 

[Scott]

Also, FWIW, I would go with XP over vista. Vista looks decent but it's an awful OS and really starts to clog after a few months use. Ensure that you run a decent AV regardless of choice though, they will be hugely compromised as far as security goes if you are online.

 

[Stephen M]

Good advice from Scotster and I would second the XP option over Vista, although I only use my XP machine off line and would not do otherwise.

 

[ubuysa]

Does your Windows 10 system use UEFI? I'm wondering whether the bootloader can cope with one MBR OS and a UEFI OS at the same time?

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

 

[pleng87845]

Disconnecting the cable from the Vista HD and using the W10 installation disk to repair the MBR did the trick somehow because the System message was that can't Windows can't do the repair!? after i turned it off and restarted it with both HDs connected to my surprise W10 came on.
I than quickly turned it off and back on and still booted in to W10. I turned it off and this time i used F12 commanding to open the disc D Vista and after a long Chkdisk sequence it booted in to Vista. So it looks like i can use both system. Thanks for the help. As far as XP instead of Vista i know that XP was the preffered system over Vista until W7 came on but in this case i prefered it because i will use it only for this one program only and the installation of Vista plus SP2 took only 6 hrs vs 12 hrs or more that XP used too with all those confusing upadates and SP2 and SP3 and those nightmerish Neframes updates etc. Who knows it maybe easier to install XP now with all those updates and drivers on discs and flashdrives but I didn't want to find out. So far Vista is behaving fine with this little but very important task that needs to do. Btw i have an other PC with XP(still booting) that had a W10 also where the W10 disk went bad and I couldn'n figure it out how to install W10 on a new disk w/o loosing XP. I think after this i found the answer to that one too. Thanks again .