Hi,

 

I am in the process of setting up dual booting on my wife's Inspiron 530s and I will share my experience.  In your case, your new disk can be formatted during the WinXP installation (NTFS formatting recommended).  I found that inserting the WinXP disk after starting Vista got me straight to installation of WinXP with the option of designating where to install it.  Unfortunately, this installation process left the XP loader in command so that I could no longer boot Vista.

 

The microsoft page
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529
describes fixing that problem, but pay attention to details.  Personally, I got a little ahead of myself and rebooted after restoring the MBR to point to the Vista Boot Manager, but before I had added Win XP to the BCD Boot.ini file.  This changed the situation to one where I could only boot Vista and not XP.  Fortunately, the article also explains how to modify BCD Boot.ini file from the Vista side.

 

I am now left with a system that can't print on my Canon L80 Fax/printer from the Vista side and can't communicate with the Internet from the XP side.  This is because the Dell/Intel LAN driver only exists in a Vista version and the fax/printer driver only exists in an XP version.  For me, adding another LAN card for WinXP will make the XP side complete.  I doubt that Canon will ever reprogram the L80 driver for Vista, but I hope I'm wrong.  I'll won't switch totally to Vista until all my software works on Vista and I finally replace my Fax/printer with a Vista compatible.

 

Expect some similar driver incompatibilities in your system and GOOD LUCK!

 

Best regards,

 

warowe

Inspiron 530s user

retired, but still active in the IEC, IEEE and SID