Best directions for dual-booting with Vista?

[D. R. Evans]

Derek Broughton said the following at 03/27/2008 06:25 AM :
> Pascal d'Hermilly wrote:
> 
>> Dual booting is so last year ;-)
>> I've been using Virtualbox  for several months now. It works great.
>> Virtualization is so much easier because you can work with both systems
>> at the same time.
>> like 768 MB ram.
> 
> Me too, me too (I absolutely refuse to post just to say "Me too").

The problem with any virtualization solution (apart from the issue of a
possible inability to access hardware, which probably is unlikely to affect
me) is that I would have to use the pre-installed Vista as the host OS.
Right there, that's enough for me not to consider it any more.

If the computer had shipped with real Vista CDs, I probably would have
tried a virtualization solution, but since I have only those silly
"restore" discs, I wouldn't be able to have Kubuntu be the host OS and
Vista the guest.

So I think I'm pretty much stuck with dual booting.

Oh, and in case anyone wonders why I asked the question in the first place,
the last time I had to install a Linux distro to dual boot (with XP) it
entailed something like the following:

1. Using knoppix to save the MBR
2. Repartitioning
3. Installing the distro
4. Restoring the saved MBR
5. Editing a Windows file called boot.ini

One mis-step and one easily ended up with a box that could no longer boot
Windows. I'm glad to discover that the process these days seems much simpler.

  Doc