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Sujet Dual Boot OS Considerations

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I have a fulltime job in addition to my DJing... so I use my laptop for a ton of other things. In order to keep VDJ running nice and fresh, I figured it would be worth it to dual-boot my laptop.

I am thinking running a stripped down version of XP on one partition (for VDJ)... and run Vista 64bit for all my regular use. This way when I want to install apps... i can do them on my Vista OS and not have to worry about corrupting the registry for VDJ.

So what would be the best way to do this. I am a very technical computer person, but its been a while since I installed a dual boot OS. I have a single 80gig HD in my laptop so space is definitely a concern. I am going to be formatting and wiping clean before I do this.

Should I do say a 10gig XP partition (for the Virtual DJ OS) which would be the C: drive... then install Vista on top of that on a different partition (like the remainder D: drive?).

Should I put all my videos on its own partition? So have say a 10gig XP C: drive.... a 20gig Vista D: drive... and a Video partition (say the E: drive?).

Any thoughts on the best way to approach this would be apreciated. Thanks in advance.
 

Posté Sun 21 Jan 07 @ 3:07 am
sbangsPRO InfinityMember since 2004
check my blog for a multipul os guide :)

videos would be good on their own partion
 

Posté Sun 21 Jan 07 @ 2:30 pm
i think this should be mentioned somewhere in the manual, too
(somewhere at the beginning where the installation is explained)
that especially for video mixing a dedicated partition for vdj use only is highly recommended
i'm pretty much sure that a lot of people use vdj on a windows installation with a lot of other crap installed
a lot of people think
vdj is like some wordprocessing program
you install it and it's ready to run...
with audio files it might do,
but with video clips it's a totally different story...



well...
getting back to the point

i have 2 primary partitions and 1 extended/logical partition on my laptop

on the 1st primary partition i have my "default" win xp with all my applications installed
pretty much all hardware deviced turned on

on the 2nd primary partition i have my "vdj" win xp
i was in a hurry... not enough time to "totally" trim it down
i uninstalled pretty much all unrelated win applications
turned off all devices and services i do not use with vdj
like wireless lan, lan, bluetooth, cd-rom etc.............
i got it down to 1.7GB
i'm working on a "real" lite version on the side
i think, i can push it down to below 1GB
even below 500MB, i believe


on my extended partition
i download stuff and have a few mp3s and music video clips,
these are more for demonstration purpose (if i would like to show somebody how vdj works)
when i play at the club, i use my external harddrive

if you have more than 1GB ram, you can turn off your pagefile
or fix it to a smaller value, something like 200~300MB (just in case)
i have 2 laptops, one has 1GB and the other one has 2GB
i turned both off
never had a problem (on the vdj only partition !!!)

of course, it depends on how much you can trim down your windows
but i think 3~5GB will do the job (pagefile turned off)

you should also have a separate partition for your data(mp3s, music video clips etc..) like me
(an external harddrive is much better)

i made ghost images for both windows installtions
so, in case of an emergency, you can just replace the partitions
it only takes 3mins, in my case, to have a "clean & trimmed down" win xp installation for vdj



another thing...
if you're afraid that something/someone(virus, other users...) might alter your vdj partition
when you booted from your default windows, in your case vista
i would recommend to use a boot manager,
which has the capability to (automatically) hide the primary partitions you are not booting from
which means, if you boot with vista you will have no access to the vdj partition
(you will not even see it in your browser)
and the other way around
i'm using smart fdisk's boot manager (hiren's bootCD)
not fancy at all, very simple...
no need to have a separate partition for the boot manager, too
i tried partition magic's magic boot, in my case, unstable



i collected most of the info from our(vdj) forum ;-)
hope this will help

happy vdjing,
matt
 

Posté Sun 21 Jan 07 @ 3:20 pm
This info definitely helps. I am going to fool around with it this week.

I am not going to use a USB hard drive for my videos though. Well at least not for my main videos. I figured I could put about 300+ videos on my main 80gb hard drive without really impacting my space. That should cover most of the music I play on my daily routine at my club.

I'll have a spare 80GB 2.5 notebook hard drive available. I am buying a 2.5 notebook USB2.0 enclosure and use that to store all my other videos (songs I don't play very often but may need if I get an odd request).

And yeah I will probably do the three partition setup that was mentioned above. Thanks.
 

Posté Mon 22 Jan 07 @ 5:58 pm
I just wiped my laptop clean and did a dual boot. Works nice.

I wanted my Vista partition to use my C: drive and XP on the D: drive... but to get dual boot working I had to install XP first.

So I used the Vista install CD to create my three paritions (C: D: E: drive). I then cancelled the install after I created the three partitions... and put the XP CD in and installed XP.

With the XP install I was able to select the D: drive to install XP. That worked. Then I installed Vista on the C: drive partition. That worked.

Looks good. E: drive will be my Videos and Music partition. Now I just have to wait for HP to get their Vista drivers out for my notebook and i'll be all set.


Oh... and I just bought the Virtual DJ software now. Hopefully I didn't jinx myself since I was able to run VJ over the weekend stable for three days. :D
 

Posté Mon 22 Jan 07 @ 11:04 pm
sbangsPRO InfinityMember since 2004
welcome :)

if you have any more questions dont hesitate to ask :)
 

Posté Mon 22 Jan 07 @ 11:06 pm


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