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| Old School Dual Boot Configured on my Dell Latitude E6500 |
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By: Brad Bird
Posted On: 1/9/2009
I have not had a reason to use dual boot in years. Right now, out of all the systems that I own, my Dell Latitude E6500 is the most powerful.
I use my laptop as my primary machine and have for 4 years now. I have no other systems right now that can expand to 8GB of RAM and are 64-bit so my laptop is serving double duty as my primary work system as well as a demo/lab system capable of running Server 2008 with Hyper-V.
The laptop is configured with Windows Vista 64-bit and that runs famously. Now, I could conceivably run only Windows Server 2008 on the laptop. In fact, I have colleagues who feel that is the way to go. I disagree with this point.
As an IT professional, my customer base is varied. I believe that Vista is still struggling in market adoption. I also believe that Windows Vista is a more secure and a better Operating System than Windows XP. What better way to demonstrate that than by example?
Another reason I prefer to use a client OS is that I have worked with lots of IT pros who all but stop using them because of where they are in their career. In my mind this is a mistake as you lose touch.
If you stop using the client OS that your customers use, you are not as familiar and stop evolving with the product. For instance if someone had been using Windows XP and stopped before SP2 came out, to me that would be a BIG deal.
Also, if you need to simulate or reproduce an issue that a customer is having, it is much faster if you have the same Operating System installed.
OK to the meat of the matter...
So I have Windows Vista installed on my laptop as the primary OS. I connected an external eSATA capable disk and installed Server2008 on it. To do so, I inserted the Windows Server 2008 DVD and ran setup from within Vista as if I was going to upgrade. The installation picked up that this was not an upgrade and proceeded to install Server 2008 on the external drive.
Incidentally, I did this in under 30 minutes to a login prompt of server 2008. That is pretty impressive!
Dual boot installed seamlessly given the way that the laptop was being setup. That was a lot easier than I remembered...
Now Server 2008 on my Dell does not inherently detect all of the hardware. For instance, neither my onboard NIC or internal wireless cards were detected. After I inserted my PCMCIA Linksys card I was fine, but otherwise I may have been stranded.
I will attempt the 64-bit Vista drivers in server 2008 as I have read several blog posts that confirm they work and will write a follow up post.
When all is said and done, I now have Windows Vista 64-bit installed and Server 2008 with Hyper-V. I select which OS to boot from dual boot and this required no changes to the boot sequence.
Production laptop and demo system all-in-one!
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