Dual Boot 32-bit and 64-bit Vista?

[nes]

Okay, what do I have to do to keep my current 32-bit installation and add Ultimate 64-bit on RAID 0 and get a dual boot option at startup? I'm going to download EasyBCD; I know that is step one (I think.....lol).

[Miker]

64bit Vista is just 32bit Vista + a 64bit programs folder. Pointless to dual boot.

[coxmaster]

I tend to think there's more of a difference than an additional folder. Otherwise, there wouldn't be separate drivers for Vist64.

Ya its a compltetly different OS. Hence why it can recognize 8GB of RAM. They didnt just limit 32 bit for the fun of it

[Kougar]

If you install Vista 64 onto a different drive than the Vista 32 install, then they should work fine together and give you the option to dualboot at boot automatically. It shouldn't require any fancy messing around with the boot files or boot manager, unlike with XP.

[nes]

Thanks Kougar, I'll give it a shot. I'm going to run Vista Ultimate 64-bit on two 250 WD HDDs in RAID 0!

[nes]

Got it to work. It was a nightmare to install 64-bit tho. Why did I have to babysit that install from 1830 - 0200 hours. I'm not playing guys. I had never seen so many bootstrap errors in my life. When I did get it to load the first two times I got to the desktop and it would lock after about 30 seconds of the environment being up. The next couple of times after that I got it to install and boot it would boot to the dreaded Black-Screen of Doom!

So then I loaded the install DVD and used the advanced disk option to format both drives. I dropped the RAID idea because I was worried that the integrity of the HDDs was somehow compromised and was causing the bad install and stability issues. I was way too happy, once I got it running approximately 8 hours later, that I didn't bother to configure RAID for SATAs 3 and 4-- oh well.

I am happy to report that I have been successfully applying updates throughout the night and the OS is online and quite stable. I have noticed that the operation system layers are very solid in the 64-bit architecture but I have yet to bench.

[Kougar]

Sorry to hear you had a bunch of difficulties with it! Hm, NVIDIA RAID too, so the RAID drivers aren't built in I believe...

Make sure you set HPET to 32bit or 64bit in your BIOS depending on which flavor OS you are running. It makes a tangible difference, and prevents quite a few issues if you are overclocking too.

[nes]

Okay