Monday, November 19, 2007

Dual boot: Vista and Win Server 2003

Wow! It was a long long long installation weekend. My Laptop's hard disk died a week ago, and I got new one which means installations!

I need both Vista and Server 2003 with Dual boot configuration on my laptop. Vista is my work and development machine, server 2003 hosted Team Foundation Server - my presentations machine.

It seems that this is not so easy to configure dual boot with Vista...after 2 formats and re-installation I finally succeeded!

Why does it so complicated? earlier versions of the Windows are incompatible with the new Windows Vista startup method. Windows Vista uses a new Boot Configuration Database (BCD) store. This store contains a boot menu and all the information about operating systems that are installed on the computer. Therefore, a Boot.ini file that is from an earlier version of the Windows operating system cannot be used to start Windows Vista.

How did I solve it? I found this useful KB and a great tool: EasyBCD.

Next time I'll be smarter...

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks, this info is very useful to me.