Dual booting Vista 32/64?

[Kalros]

Ok, my new copy of Vista Home 64-bit version is in the mail! So now I want to set it up to Dual-Boot with my current 32-bit installation. I was planning on installing it on a 2nd SATA hard drive.

My plan was to just unplug the current hard drive, plug in the blank one and install. Then plug them both in and hope that it recognizes both installations and lets me choose.

Wishful thinking? Do I have to do something more complex to get it set up to dual-boot?

[Erron]

A few motherboards have a boot manager built into them that makes dual booting OS's on different hard drives fairly painless. You might check into that. Otherwise you may have to learn a bit about BCDEdit.exe, which can be a royal pain for some.

[EaTCarbS]

May I ask (out of curiosity ) why you want to dual boot the 32 bit and 64 bit version of vista?

[Kalros]

I've been running this 32-bit version of Vista for quite some time now, so I have accrued several files/programs/music/etc. And I hear that 64-bit OSs dont support alot of old (and sometimes not so old) programs/hardware/drivers. I'm only even going the 64-bit route so I can bump up to 8GB of RAM to better 5-box in Northrend. So I figured I would keep my old installation intact and just use the new one for whenever I need more than 4GB of RAM for gaming.

[confusedtx5]

Don't unplug the old hdd, just leave it in and make sure you install the new Vista64 onto your blank hdd.
If you don't allow the vista install to reformat the hdd, you don't run too great of a risk of losing your old files should you choose the wrong drive to install onto.

[wowphreak]

I'll go out on a limb here if it works in vista 32 its gonna work in vista 64. Vista 64 emulates for 32 bit programs since just about all program yeh buy are still 32bit.

That being said there's a variaty of ways yeh can "dual boot" easist I would say is if yeh have 2 drives pull one install vista64 to the other add the other drive and then go into bios and switch the boot from option.

[EaTCarbS]

I have had no compatibility issues with anything in vista x64. Its just XP x64 that I have ever seen a lack of support for.