Dual Boot Vista RC1 and xp on seperate hardrives?

Question

I have vista rc1 on one hard drive and xp home and another. I am going to install the xp harddrive shortly and would like to know how to dual boot.

Answer 1

You need a boot manager installed on the primary harddrive. Windows has one built in, but its not the easiest, you would need to edit your boot.ini file. Partition magic also includes one, but i've never tried it and its not free

Once you have a boot manager, you will need to add the boot file of the other secondary OS. Then when you boot your system, it will give you the option of which you would like to start.

Answer 2

instead of a boot manager, you may simply use a feature of your BIOS, provided you have a somewhat recent motherboard (up to five years...)
in the "Advanced Features" of the BIOS there will be a choice of boot device;
if you want to install several OSes, the 1st one should be CD/DVD;
the 2nd one should be one of the Hard Disks, usually from HDD0 to HDD3 (ATA1 master / slave and ATA2 master / slave.
by picking one of the four HDs, you'll leave M$$$$$ LostDOS no choice but too install onto and boot from that HD, and having different versions on each of the HDs.