dual boot vista and xp pro

[diablo1]

xp pro was installed first awhile ago on its own separate hard drive, then on another hard drive i installed vista .. both were not installed connected ..

they werent connected together as master and slave while installing the operating systems . after the OS's were installed, then i connected the vista hard drive as primary master and xp pro hard drive as primary slave.

now how do i dual boot? i tried easy bcd and that didnt work...

vista doesnt have a boot.ini like in xp pro...
all ive read was dual booting both OS on the same drive mine are on separate drives..

what do i need to make vista and xp pro dual boot, with vista as primary master and xp pro as primary slave

vista is c drive
xp pro is e drive
both 32 bit

thanks

[haapy]

By definition, dual boot implies BOTH operating systems on ONE hard drive, not on two separate drives.

For you to make your configuration work with two hard drives, you are going to have to swap cables to configure the master to be the boot drive for which ever OS you want to boot from.

[diablo1]

vista is my c-drive an as a primary master, xp pro is primary slave.. the jumpers are set correctly.. vista boots up now, i want the option to be able to choose which operating system to start up... an option when i boot up my computer saying


windows vista
windows xp pro

then i have 30 seconds or so to pick which i want, vista or xp then the computer will boot into the system i want..

i had it set up with two separate HD with xp on each..

now that vista is on my main primary master replacing one of the xp OS's, i only can boot into vista and if i want to boot into xp i cant now...

not sure why i have to change the cable order... maybe i didnt explain enough what i wanted to do....

how can i get this accomplished
i need to change the boot.ini file but there isnt one in vista, and used to be able to change the boot.ini in xp when xp was my primary master and the other was xp as well. now one HD is vista and changing the boot.ini in vista, im lost

[haapy]

You can only use dual boot with BOTH operating systems installed on ONE hard drive.

You CAN NOT dual boot with a master/slave combination of TWO hard drives.

If you have one hard drive with Vista and you want to boot from Vista you must make the Vista hard drive the master using the cable.

If you have one hard drive with XP and you want to boot from XP you must make the XP hard drive the master using the cable.