I successfully got Xp and Vista Ult. 32 bit to install and run on one machine. (don't ya just love having to pick from 6 or 8 flavors of Vista)
Their both installed on separate RAID Arrays on the same machine, I pulled my 320 sata, and installed a 3rd and 4th Diamond Max 160 sata in my remaining drive bays. Xp was up and running on the other array so that was a cinch.
Went into bios and enabled raid on the two new drives, booted VIsta to the cdrom drive, and much to my amazement it installed flawlessly on an Asus m2n-e board (had to juggle a few pre-downloaded drivers (if you can always pre-download those new drivers and bios it's much less frustrating). I had to do a little searching to figure out how to get Vista to take a RAID array.
Which I found here http://www.legitreviews.com/article/454/1/ (Nathan Kirsch - [email protected]) Kudos Nathan it was a big help.
Thus far i have had no problem with Vista and Xp running on separate arrays, other than having to go into BIOS to tell the machine which array I want to boot, a minor inconvenience at best. After all the Vista horror stories I had read up on I was expecting nightmares for weeks.
The fun started when I wanted a decent sound card that would run in both Vista and XP. (Vista BTW doesn't support 6.1 or 7.1 speakers, Gates needs to wake up, never take a step backwards when it comes to Op systems) I searched for 3 days to find a card that would run both without having to use after market or cruddy 3rd party drivers.
I opened up the casing and removed my old SB Audigy card, and installed the new SB X-FI extreme Audio PCIE sound card (Which I found for $42.06 a great deal for OEM BULK w/driver disk if your hankering for a good deal here it is: http://www.thenerds.net/CREATIVE_LABS.S ... 000001.htm)
I ordered the card on Monday the 5th and received it on Wed the 7th pretty amazing)
After installing the card I went for the updated drivers from the web figuring to bypass installing the stale drivers from the OEM Disk then installing the web drivers. Don't go there; the web drivers on both XP and Vista failed to find the X-FI extreme Audio. After extensive searching over at Microsoft (microhades.com) and Creative.com nothing was found. Were talking 2 hours of why won't my new stuff just install and leave me alone for a change.
Picked myself up from the whining pit and went ahead and installed the OEM drivers from the bulk disk in both Vista and XP. To my amazement it installed flawlessly in both. I rebooted and installed the newer web drivers on both worked flawlessly. (After the initial 2 hour flaw lol). Then a utility popped up and offered to download the newest drivers (a creative updater) and offered to download newer drivers for me. Of course it didn't find any newer drivers as I am endowed with a type of idiot savant ability to find drivers (this ability is enhanced by 2 to 3 beers for some reason).
After all that let me say it was well worth it. I un-boxed my new Creative Labs Speaker Inspire P7800 7.1 set of speakers argued with my better half about speaker cable placement (I won but I had to give some up later), set my speakers on the "L" shaped double decker desk, and ceiling. Then I fired up Windows media player in XP and sound so sweet came rolling out that it was enough to make a grown man happy dance about his front room (in a manly manner of course). So i cut that off and loaded Half Life 2 the Orange Box and slaughtered some Alien Zombies in full surround sound (awesome).
I spent an extra hour loading HL2 in Vista, and another hour 20 Minutes downloading updates from Valve (required to run the game) then fired it up on Vista, got good sound but only in 5.1 surround, apparently it ignores the two side speakers completely in Vista. No big deal 5.1 flawless in Vista you might as well climb Everest.
Here's the damages:
2 sata 160 $64 X 2 $128 + 12 shipping $140
1 Creative X-FI extreme Audio $42.06 + 10 sh $52.06
1 Creative Labs Speaker Inspire P7800 7.1 $82 + 14 sh $96
Total Damages $288.06
Worst of all now I gotta update my profile here lol
Not to bad. Later on I'll make an executive decision and probably convert the drives over to a 4 x raid 0 array on one of the two operating systems, though past raid 3x it seems like you lose a little efficiency. But that's another headache
Laters hope this was helpful/enjoyable
