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Well be carefull because if you dualboot its slightly complicated to remove the one system if its vista you want to remove
Check to see if your motherboard supports quick booting to other drives.
Vista I would say should need at least 30/40 gigs
I installed it on a 20 and there is only 8 left so thats not a lot of room for programs or anything
Actually, there is a difference between dual boot and two hard drives.
If you install two operation systems, one on one hard drive and one on another hard drive, then this is not duel boot.. It is however, far far easier to do and easily to managed. With two hard drives, you can mount them both in the machine and use the bios to switch between them, OR you can even put in a removable hard drive bracket and simply turn off the machine and swap drive bays (one each with each drive in it).
The advantage of separate drives in separate bays is that nothing that should hurt one drive (like a virus) will have no chance of hurting the other drive.
The advantage of separate drives both mounted and using the bios to switch them is, you are able to access information on the other drive no mater which drive your booted to (if they are setup compatibly).
The advantage of duel boot however is, the use of one drive when a second drive is not available AND / OR the use of the boot menu as provided by the OS's menu you have setup to use to boot from.
I hope that helped clear that up... if it did, now consider one more thing..
Ferrit talks about hitting F11 (function key 11 before the OS even begins) and what he is talking about is, his mother board has the ability to show the OSs it recognizes to be installed... No Scratch that.. how can it? It reports the Hard drives installed in the machine and hence (you knowing which one is which) the OSs installed in the machine... (sorry, thought I'd answer the quest about the OS and DRIVES before it was asked lol ) There are a few mother boards like this, take some Compaqs or HPs (same thing lol ) that will automatically detect two drives and pop up a menu asking which drive you wish to boot from..
This then is not exactly considered by us as duel boot but a far easier, safer, quicker.. you get it. solution to duel booting a computer... Also, duel booting (meaning two) in actuality could mean three four or more partitions and OSs on a drive and not just two! And as someone else mentioned (and I didn't know but makes perfect sense) if setting up a duel boot, start with the OLDest OS first to avoid incompatibility issues. Such issues are like, win98 will not read a NTFS drive. Some issues don't matter like Win95a/b not reading larger than a FAT16 drive (can't say for c, I don't remember).
I myself.. have always taken the easy road (except once, I had a lilo boot) and choose to use separate drives where as my tech would almost certainly take the duel boot approach (although I'd admit, he is a lot smarter than me even with my old age at this stuff).
Barry,