Vista & XP Dual Boot

The second hard drive is a good method, just be sure the Vista drive is unplugged during the XP install, would not want to format the Vista drive by accident. Use a different sata port to connect the XP drive, do not use the one you unplugged from the Vista drive.

 

after XP install is done, connect the Vista drive, and boot into Vista and use this utility to get the dual boot going.  http://www.vistabootpro.org/

 

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dime520/en/SM_EN/parts.htm#wp1211782  scroll down to "adding a second hard drive"

Hi shen318 & jcoane

When you dual boot XP & Vista XP will delete your restore points in Vista  XP thinks they are invalid

and puff they are gone , but Vista does not remove XP restore points i though i would let you know that if you did not know it.

Check it out and see for yourself there is a work around if you can find it i never tried to find it because i do not dual boot any more.

See Yea.

Hi

That is the way i did it when i was booting that way have Vista on the first drive turn it off in the bios to get to XP on second drive,and XP will boot from the second drive.

Good Luck !

 

Ok I must have done something wrong. I have Vista 32 bit.on my C drive, and booted my original system restore disk to the d drive, however after the XP install, my computer would only boot to XP and not vista. Any ideas what I did wrong??

 

Also since upgrading to vista on my dimension 8400 I now have no sound at all. anyone else have this issue or am i just the chosen one??

 

TIA.

Ok, from what I've read so far when you install XP after Vista it will rewrite the Boot Loader to run XP only. You need to reconfig the Vista boot loader and it's not easy as edit boot.ini like in XP. There are some free software I found to help you with that. Check the link I listed above they have really good instruction on setting up a dual boot system. I am going to give it a try this weekend.

If you will read the second post in this thread, I posted a link to the boot editor you need to use, as I advised.

Hello shen318,

 

Yes this is possible. But needs to be done a specific way. Check out my previous posts on Dual boot. I'm cutting back on lengthy posts since recently they seem to disappear,which is a waste of time on my part. Obviously the powers that be have other ideas. PM me.

 I manage to install a Dual Boot Vista-XP perfectly well on that HP Laptop who came only with Vista Home Edition. In that case I just erased everything and make a clean instal for Vista first, I even delete the restore partition. I used The VistaBootPro on that  laptop which had only two partitions originally: The small restore and the normal Vista side, and I inserted a third partition with XP.

My problem know is that I bought the Dell Inspiron 1521 and find out that came with 4 partitions, not 2!  The restore and the Vista OS partitions are quite normal but I can see now other two (factory installed) quite small: one with only 63MB and other with 2.5 GB. On the first you can only read "healthy (EISA configuration)" and on the other with 2.5 GB you can read "healthy (primary partition).

I tried to do the same I did with the two particioned HP laptop, shrinking first the Vista OS to obtain a new unallocated space which allows me to install the Xp, and I did it! but the problem comes after, because when I tried to obtain the "new simple volume" I received and error telling me that there was no available space! which was not true!. So what can I do know? Anyone has this situation?, and somebody can help me please?, What should I do?

NOTE: I really wish not to disturb the original Vista installation, would that be posible?