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Is there a better way to dual boot XP and Win10?

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First post, by Fujoshi-hime

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I have an 'Over Powered Windows XP Machine' in that it's mostly the very last hardware that supported Windows XP, but in a far more retro looking case, and that hardware can also run Windows 10. I dual booted both so I could use Windows 10 for 'Modern Ports Of Retro Games' while still having the vibe of sitting at a beige eMachine case.

However, with time, something Windows 10 did with the drives made Windows XP angry. On every boot of XP, after Win10 was booted, XP would run Check Disk before getting into the OS and correct literally like 10 000 things. Over and over and over again.

What I'd like is a 'better' way to dual boot. Doing it 'The WIndows Way' means both systems share a Windows boot loader and also have to have that particular partition mounted. I think that caused some issues. Is there an alternate bootloader I could run, maybe something off a tiny USB flash drive, and I could have XP and 10 on discrete drives and they'd never mount each other's drives or even really acknowledge that each other exists?

Right now my best option is to just never set a default boot device and choose manually for the BIOS on each boot.

Reply 1 of 4, by Shponglefan

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With certain bootloaders you can hide partitions from one another.

I use BootIt Bare Metal. While I haven't done Windows 10, I've installed Win95, two 98 installs, Me, NT 4.0, 2000 and XP, all on the same computer running from two SSD drives. Each version of Windows is completely invisible to all the others. They can't see each others partitions.

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Reply 2 of 4, by VivienM

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I typically have just gone into disk management in both XP and 11 (my dual boots are 11, unsupportedly as BIOS/MBR obviously) and set each OS not to mount the other's partition. That seems to keep them away from each other enough.

Reply 3 of 4, by Horun

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Agree ! You can set Windows to not allow a drive from being seen/touched when dual booting. Had similar issue with Win 7 and XP dual boot on diff drives and set them both to not see the other OS partition.
Know that the Shadow copy and Recycle are just some of the stuff not cross OS compatible...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 4, by Fujoshi-hime

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I did my best to keep both systems from using each other's partitions and not mounting them, but since they shared a bootloader seems at least XP wanted to look the other's drive too much.

But I'll check out some of these suggestions.

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