Installing Windows Vista in a Dual-Boot setup

Assuming you have an additional free hard drive or partition, you can follow the steps outlined in the clean install section earlier in the chapter when performing a dual-boot installation:

Boot with the Windows Vista DVD, choose Install, enter your product key, agree to the EULA, and so on. Where you’re going to have to pay attention is when Setup reaches the screen that asks, “Which type of installation do you want?” This is shown in Figure 2-24.

Choose the Custom (advanced) install type and click Next. Then, examine the next screen, which should resemble Figure 2-25. In this screen, be sure to choose the empty partition that’s been set aside for Windows Vista and not your XP partition. If you followed our advice in the previous section, you gave this partition an easy-to-recognize name like Vista ahead of time.

Heads-up. In this phase of Setup, you want to be sure to make the right choices.

Careful: You want to choose the empty partition, not the XP partition.

After that, Setup will proceed, again, exactly as it does during a clean install. After Windows Vista is installed, however, you will notice one difference: When you reboot the PC, a boot menu, like the one shown in Figure 2-26, appears, letting you choose between your previous operating system (Earlier Version of Windows) and Windows Vista.

Microsoft’s new dual-boot menu lets you choose between your previous operating system (typically some version of Windows XP) and Windows Vista

You might notice that the boot menu uses a fairly lengthy 30 second countdown during which time it waits for you to choose an operating system. That’s a long time to wait, and if you’re not sitting there waiting to make a choice, your system will waste a lot of time waiting to boot. Good news: If you think 30 seconds is too long, there’s a way to change this behavior.


To do so, open the Start Menu, right-click Computer, and choose Properties. This will dis- play the new System Information window, as shown in Figure 2-27.

Now, click the “Advanced system settings” link in the Tasks list on the left side of the System Information window. This will display the System Properties dialog, which is quite similar to the System Properties dialog from Windows XP. Navigate to the Advanced tab and click the button labeled Settings that appears in the Startup and Recovery section. This, finally, will display the Startup and Recovery dialog box, shown in Figure 2-28, where, yes, you can configure startup options.

The default System Information window is much more detailed than the version in Windows 2000 or XP.

It’s buried deep, but this dialog box can be used to configure the boot menu and other boot options.

Here, you can make a number of choices, but the relevant ones are:

Determine which operating system is the default choice. Windows Vista is the default choice, by default.

Determine how much time will elapse while the boot menu is displayed before the system boots into the default operating system.

We like to set the timer to a small value like 3 or 5 seconds so that Windows Vista boots quickly but we have enough time to make a choice if we want to.

I’ve been referring to Windows Vista’s dual-boot capabilities throughout this chap- ter, but the reality is that Windows Vista (and previous NT-based Windows versions like Windows 2000 and XP) support multi-booting. That’s right: With the right parti- tioning scheme, gobs of hard drive space, and plenty of time on your hands, you can configure your PC to boot between two, three, four, or more operating systems. Such a setup is conceptually interesting but of little use in the real world, at least for most people. As the saying goes, people who are dual-booting aren’t getting any- thing done.