Dual Booting XP 32 bit and Vista 64 bit?

[sm40oztofreedom]

Hey guys! My father recently purchased a new dell that comes with Vista 64 bit edition, mainly because it comes with 6 gigs of ram. My question is would it be possible to dual boot his old copy of windows xp 32 bit alongside with 64 bit vista? Ive done dual booting before with xp 32 bit and linux no prob. Also wondering if he could take out his old hard drive currently in his old computer (running 32 bit xp) and put it into the new computer as a secondary hard drive utilizing that as the xp boot and retaining all his programs settings and whatnot on the xp boot? Basically wanting to start his computer up with with fresh vista 64 bit or being able to pick xp 32 bit and having his old computer setup on that? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again

 

[Tommy Boy]

First off, no you won't be able to pull the hard drive out of another computer and put it in the new machine and expect it to work, XP just won't let you do that. You can put it in the new machine as a slave drive and pull files from it that you want to save though.

As for the dual booting, Here is a guide that a quick google search found and should prove helpful to you.

 

[sm40oztofreedom]

thank you for the quick reply. I also found similar articles on how to dual boot, but i haven't seen any in detail as to a 64 bit vista and a 32 bit xp. Personally i know a decent amount about computers but never have had experience with 64 bit as of yet. So just wondering if thats going to cause problems. My dad definitely has some older programs that i wouldn't expect to run on vista 64.

 

[Tommy Boy]

Well, I don't seriously think it matters whether it's vista 32bit or 64bit, the install procedure should be the same.

 

[sm40oztofreedom]

oh im sure the install will be exactly the same, i just didnt know if you had to run only 64 bit OS's on it or only 32 bit's...didnt know if you could mix and match ya know?

 

[Tommy Boy]

oh im sure the install will be exactly the same, i just didnt know if you had to run only 64 bit OS's on it or only 32 bit's...didnt know if you could mix and match ya know?

I don't see why not, they are 2 separate os's and won't be interacting with each other.

 

[Cabbs]

It doesn't matter what version of the OS they are since they will be on different partitions and have nothing to do with each other.