Dual-booting XP and Server 2008: Caveats? | The Coffeehouse

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I'm thinking about setting up a dual-boot configuration with XP and Server 2008 (for learning, experimentation, etc., not for real use as a server). Is anyone aware of any problems or issues I might have with this configuration?

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Shouldn't have any trouble as long as you install Win2k8 last (otherwise XP will overwrite the BCD bootloader with the old-style NTLDR; you can still restore the BCD loader afterwards but it's just easier if you do it the right way around to begin with).

Why not just install Win2k8 in a VM though? Saves you having to reboot when you want to experiment with it.

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In reply to Sven Groot

#Sep 13th, 2008 @ 9:30 AM

Performance, primarily. 2k8 is slow as crap in a VM (since I can't allocate all my RAM to it, it has to swap constantly... I've got 1 GiB, but I can only allocate 512 GiB to the VM).

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In reply to CannotResolveSymbol

#Sep 13th, 2008 @ 9:36 AM

Got it installed (after a messed up install where it couldn't find WinLoad.exe... probably had something to do with my computer's 137GB BIOS limit, because doing the initial install to a partition wholly inside that limit worked fine, although curiously enough I was able to expand that partition and it still booted afterwards).

Performance is much better than in a VM, and (to my surprise), Aero Glass works flawlessly (with Catalyst drivers modded to work with my Mobility Radeon X300). This makes Vista much more tempting... I had feared that performance was going to be horrible on my older laptop.