Ladybug,

I agree with your accessment of Williams tutorial. It is a great way to set up XP/vista as dual booting.....here it is....BUT, I think that using a third party boot manager will and is the easiest way to accomplish the same thing....and a whole lot less troublesome.

As an explanation...the windows bootmanager combines the MBR (master boot record) of all the operating system into one to boot all operating systems. With older operating sytem this was determined that the oldest OS had to be installed first in order to have the corrected MBR for all operating systems to boot properly. Williams tutorial bypasses this and allows you to install newer first then older and then to repair the MBR so as to be operational for booting either of the operating system.

Third party bootmanagers superceed this issue by actually hiding and protecting the MBR of each operating system from the other installed operating systems. This hiding the MBR protects the integrity of the operating system....and by doing so allows for the booting of any operating system installed in/on any partition yet allows for the sharing of files and folders (not programs) between the OSs. As such any one OS can/may be removed without damage to the others and also means that they can be repaired easier from the other operating system as well.

simply put...if you use windows boot manager and the MBR corrupts itself then there is no getting into any other OS either. With third party bootmanager....if any MBR corrupts you can still boot to the other operating system to try to repair or to use it to back up the files for easier reformating/reinstallation.

I personally use BootIt NG from terabyte unlimited but is a paid for boot manager. I have been experimenting with GAG a free boot manager and have found it to be extremely worthy of use. I have it installed on my testing computer for over 6 months now with absolutely no problems at all.

Install GAG to any harddrive in your system and it will allow you to install up to 9 operating systems on your computer. Each installation is done as a new install by just booting to that partition and installing that OS as if it were the only one installed. If you later decide that there is no more need for a particular OS then simply reformat and make the drive as storage or remove the drive. Either way you don't have to worry about damaging any other operating system or partition. This means simply that any operating system can be installed on any partition or drive that you have and in any order or removed as the same without damaging any other partition.

When you boot the operating sytem will then automatically become the "C" partition and the others will be alloted accordingly...this should answer most of your questions and concerns.

All you need to remember is that each installation is as if there was no other operating systems installed.

This also makes it much easier for backing up the files and data on each OS.