In an earlier blog I went on about the coolness of Windows Server 2008 and about how I intend to use it for my main productivity OS. This would not be the choice of most folks, nor, it would seem, to be the choice Microsoft would have you make. Gone are the days of the NT Workstation, it looks like a point that Microsoft wants to make clear without so many words. Servers is for serving, Vista is for everything else. And with what looks to trend at 3 times the cost for Server over Vista Ultimate the encouragement by Microsoft toward Vista for non-server OS would be a strong one. Also, there is very little that you can not do functionally with Vista over Win2008 even where heavy sandbox dev environments are needed. But too much stuff is really the issue, not the other way around. The flip side is you loose Microsoft tools in Win2008 such as Movie/DVD maker, and even little things like installing Messenger are not supported without a little hacking in Win2008.
So I've really had to scratch my head with all things considered and second guessing about building my sand box. Virtual Server is an option but which OS to use as a host? You also have to also consider that Virtual Server only supports 32 bit Operating Systems. So Vista as the host, well then you loose out on playing with 64 bit only servers that MS is pushing more and more of, Exchange for instance. I tried Vista as a virtual machine and, well... best of luck to you if you have a really, really boss rig you may have a usable VM; not me.
So, hard drive space is cheap and even a bit easy with SATA drives... dual boot is the answer that I eventually settled in after reinstalling Vista (with sp1 w00t, sucks less) because I wanted to do a little playing with Movie Maker and DVD Maker... ok, ok and Texas Hold'em. I had to do a little partition swapping to add a new drive and liberate one that was in the system for other purposes so I started looking for my old faithful Partition Magic disc buried somewhere under the dust piles. But doing a little research I see folks saying you don't need it anymore! So the deal is that in Vista and Win2008 you can resize (Shrink and Expand) a partition in Computer Manger under the administrative tools [Disk Management]. And with the proper switches for the new command line tool (eye role, Unix much?) Robocopy you can copy a partition one to the other verbatim, verbatim in the context that it works afterward as opposed to say xcopy. Well I tried this and it didn't turn out so well, for some reason not everything would fit on the destination partition. Rather than sweating the small stuff figured I would just do the old mirror and break trick of mirroring the OS partition to the new drive, remove the old drive, boot the mirror and break it. Everything went fine with Win2008 and not so much so with Vista. Vista does not support software mirror BTW so you would have to do this under Win2008. Short of it was the Vista booted up, all my programs worked (office, visual studio, games) as I would have expected but iexplorer crashed and I kept getting errors about iertutil.dll. Rrrr!, half a day messing with that and I sucked it up and reinstalled Vista. This honestly may have not been Vista's fault but rather IE8 Bata that I was running, I don't know, I'm just a sucker for shiny.
Great, I got Vista and Win2008 on the same machine and I can switch back and forth as I like. Win2008 for my fully functional sand box, Vista for my uber AI pwnage in Texas Hold'em and I am good to go, except for the small matter of Vista being my default boot OS and "Windows Server 2008 - mirror plex" being the label for Windows 2008 in boot selector. Ok so I just change the boot.ini, np... cue the sound effect for a can of worms being open.
I really hate letting the big things get by me, like there not being a boot.ini anymore. Seems like I should have stumbled across this little tid-bit o'trivia somewhere along the way. I do vaguely recall seeing dual boot postings regarding XP and Vista. I imagine now that this was what all that was about. So yea BCD (Boot Configuration Data) is the new thing. There is a tool by NeoSmart called EasyBCD (I'll let you read through the latest on it yourself) that lets you edit the BCD configuration file without using/GUI for the the command line tool BCDedit.exe. A word of advice here however, always back up the current boot data in a easy to find location incase the reboot goes badly or you will be spending time in the repair/recover boot up option of Vista/Win2008 install cd fixing it.
In my next post I will share with you my solution for quickly booting from one OS to the other without that annoying 30 sec delay or choosing the OS by using a script that utilizes BCDedit and the handy-dandy shutdown command.
