How To Dual Boot Vista and XP With Vista Inst

How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide
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James Bannan 29 May 2007 331 days ago. Send to a friend Print
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So you've discovered Vista isn't quite ready for prime-time and now you want to put XP back on your PC. Here's how to dual-boot Vista and XP, if Vista is already installed.Now updated with a new version of EasyBCD.
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Updated 29 May 2007 with a new version of EasyBCD. Login here Scenario: You want to install Vista on your PC alongside your XP installation, on the same drive. You have installed Vista already. (If you have XP installed first, check out our earlier tutorial on how to dual boot Vista and XP with XP installed first.) Tutorial Summary: We're going to use the DISKPART on the Vista DVD to shrink the Vista partition on the hard disk and create enough space for an installation of Vista. We'll then install XP, repair the Vista bootloader which will be overwritten during the XP installation, and then use the EasyBCD utility to configure Vista's bootloader to boot the XP partition. This is an updated tutorial, based on our first Windows Vista/XP dual-booting workshop. The main difference is that EasyBCD has been updated, but the processes are essentially unchanged. This tutorial was tested on a VMWare 6 Workstation and an AcerPower SK50 system. RSS feeds Sign up now!
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Prepare Windows Vista

This tutorial assumes that Vista has been installed on a partition which takes up 100% of the hard drive, so we need to create some space. Boot off the Vista DVD. Hit Next from the start screen and then select Install now. (If Vista came preinstalled on your machine and you don't have a Vista install DVD, you can use the Gnome Partition Editor Gparted to do it. Our earlier tutorial on dual-booting XP and Vista if you've installed XP first describes how to use it.)
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How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide How to dual-boot Vista with XP step-by-step guide with screenshots How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first) How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (XP installed first) How to dual boot Linux and Windows XP (Linux installed first) How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Linux is already installed) HOW TO: create a bootable XP SP3 CD
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Install Vista
Dont type in your product key and untick Automatically activate Windows when Im online, then hit Next, and No when asked whether you want to enter the key.
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http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_s... 24/4/2008
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About me: Thinks Vista is better than XP.
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12 months for only $79.95 (save A$39.45) for 12 issues Vista Product Key read more
When prompted to choose the edition of Vista youre installing you can actually select any of them as were not doing a Vista install at this point. Also tick I have selected the edition of Windows that I purchased and hit Next.
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2600XT (6) 4.0GB (5) 40in (4) 8800GT (3) Acer (5) all rounder (19) Antec (4) APC (3) Apple (109) Aspire (4)
Vista Version
Accept the license terms and hit Next again, then choose a Custom installation. On the screen where youre asked where you want to install Windows, you should see a single large partition marked Primary this is where Vista is already installed.
Vista Partition
Press SHIFT + F10. This is a Windows PE 2.0 shortcut to open up a command window very useful trick.
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motherboard (6) MSI (4) NAS (5) notebooks (51) O2 (4) open source (45) operating system (3) OQO (4) os x (3) Palm (3) PC (3) PC cases (17) PC Hardware (280) Command Tool Pentax (3) Phones (50) photosmart (3) Pioneer (5) Type in DISKPART and press Enter. This opens the Microsoft DiskPart application. You need to select the active disk, so type in: list disk The primary disk is generally Disk 0, so type in: select disk 0 portable media (11) Portege (4) printer (10) PSU (6) PVR (3) Samsung (6) Sansa (4) Second Life (20) Servers (4) Sex (16) Shareware (3) small business (5) smartphone (10) Software (57) Sony (9) Spam (4) storage (6) streaming (3) Tagan (4) Tech.Ed (10) Telecommunications (37) Telstra (20) Toshiba (4) DISKPART Disk ultraportable (10) UMPC (11) UPnP (4) VAIO (4) Now we need a list of volumes on this disk, so type in: list volume In this case Volume 0 is the one we want, so type in: select volume 0 video (3) Vista (195) Web 2.0 (3) WiMax (4) Windows (372) Windows XP (3) WinHEC (4) wireless (8) Xeon (4) XP (3) XPS (5)
DISKPART Volume
Brands
ABC (1) Acer (4) Adobe (2)
Now type in: shrink
Apple (7) Aspire (3) ASUS (12) Blackberry (4) Brother (1) Canon (5) Casio (5)
DISKPART Shrink
DiskPart will go off and reclaim as much of the drive as it can you should get at least 50% of the space back. Now type
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EXIT HP (11) and EXIT (again) to quit the command window and get back to the install screen. Click Refresh and the partition window will update you should now see the original Primary partition plus a brand new partition. HTC (3) Intel (7) Internode (2) Lenovo (3) LG (4) Linux (1) Microsoft (17) Mio (4) Mozilla (1) MSI (2) Nokia (1) NVIDIA (1) O2 (1) OQO (1) PayPal (1) Pentax (1) Pioneer (3) PIPE Networks (1) Primus (1) Qantas (1) New Partitions This is where we will install Windows XP. Eject the DVD, restart the machine (just hit the reset button) and boot off the Windows XP CD. QNAP (1) RIM (2) Samsung (2) Seasonic (3) Sigma (1) Sony (4) Sony Ericsson (1) Telstra (3) Three (2) Toshiba (4) Virgin (1) Vodafone (1)
Now, install Windows XP

When the Windows XP setup reaches the point where youre prompted where it is to be installed, youll see that while XP can see the space we created earlier, it can also see the partition with Vista on it.
XP Partition
You should be able to see the space you reclaimed on the disk earlier which has become "unallocated space". Create a second partition using the Windows XP installer screen above by selecting the free space on the drive and pressing "C" to create a partition (if prompted, choose NTFS as the file system.) Irritatingly, XP assigns a drive letter to this partition (C:) which means that it will use the next available drive letter after all the other physical drives have been taken into account. This means that the system drive of the XP installation wont be C:. From XPs perspective this isnt really a problem its smart enough to figure out where everything should go but some applications make assumptions about where they should install to, and cant cope with a non-standard Windows configuration. This was also the case with our tutorial on dualbooting Ubuntu and XP, where Ubuntu had been installed first. However in that scenario, even though the XP system drive had a non-standard drive letter, it couldnt read the Linux partitions so there was no danger of the two systems overlapping. This is not the case with Vista/XP. Nonetheless, install XP as normal theres no need to do anything differently. IMPORTANT NOTE after the initial file copy, Windows XP reboots and loads up the GUI-based component of the install. You may get the following error: A disk read error occurred press Ctrl-Alt-Del to continue. This is caused by a corrupt bootloader click here to see how to fix this problem. When the system reboots it wont bring up a boot menu. Although XP recognises the Vista partition it doesnt recognise Vista itself. The Windows XP bootloader gets installed to the MBR and Vista can no longer boot. When XP loads, open up Windows Explorer and youll see something interesting a C: and (in this case) an E: drive. The C: drive contains Windows Vista, and as Windows XP can read NTFS partitions, it can browse and modify Vistas file structure. More importantly, applications which have installation paths hard-coded into their install scripts rather than using Windows system parameter variables could easily dump files into C: when they should be installing to E:. This isnt such a great situation.
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Two Drives
Restoring Vista and dual booting

Because you cant use the Windows XP bootloader to boot Vista, we have to reinstate Vistas bootloader to the MBR and configure it to manage both operating systems. Compared with scenarios involving Ubuntu where you have to reinstall the GRUB bootloader, getting Vista up and operational again is very easy. Boot from the Vista DVD and on the screen where youre prompted to Install now, select Repair your computer.
Repair Vista
The next screen searches for local Vista installations there should only be one, so click Next.
Choose Vista
This loads the System Recovery Options screen. Select the first option Startup Repair. This looks for problems which would prevent Vista from loading (like a missing bootloader) and automatically fixes them.
Startup Repair
If you click on Click here for diagnostic and repair details and scroll to the bottom of the list, it shows that the problem detected and repaired was a corrupt boot sector (according to Vista, anyway).
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Repair Diagnostics
Click Close and then Finish, and the system will restart and boot into Vista. Now we need to enable dualbooting with XP, and EasyBCD is the best application to achieve this. Download and install EasyBCD. Launch the app and go to Add/Remove Entries. Under Add an Entry and under the Windows tab and select in the Version drop-down list Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3. Change the Drive to E:\ and the name to Windows XP, then click Add Entry and Save.
Vista & XP - EasyBCD
Reboot the system and youll have two entries in the Vista bootloader, and can boot into either operating system.
Vista Bootloader
Removing Windows XP
If you eventually decide that dualbooting XP as the second OS isnt all its cracked up to be, its pretty easy to undo the changes made. Use EasyBCD to remove the Windows XP boot entry, and then go into Computer Management (right-click on Computer, Manage) and go to Disk Management. Right-click E: drive (the Windows XP partition) and select Delete Volume. Right-click the newly-created partition and select Delete Partition. Then right-click the C: drive (the Vista system partition) and click Extend Volume this opens up the Extend Volume Wizard.
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Extend Volume Wizard The wizard gives you a readout on how much space is actually available to extend the partition enter in how much you want to use and press Next. Vista will extend the system partition to reclaim the disk and Windows is well and truly gone.
Fixing the corrupt bootloader

If the Windows XP bootload corrupts during the install, performing a reinstall wont fix it, nor will going into the XP Recovery Mode and attempting to repair the MBR. Luckily, the install was up to the stage where all you need to do is be able to boot from the Windows XP partition, and the install will pick up from where it left off. To achieve this, follow the procedure outlined above to restore the Vista bootloader (under "Restoring Vista and Dualbooting"). This allows the system to boot into Vista, and then you can use EasyBCD to create an XP boot entry and boot into that to continue on with XP's installation. (For details on using EasyBCD, also see the section "Restoring Vista and Dualbooting".) Other APC dual-booting tutorials: The definitive dual-booting guide: Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step
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JR: "Windows Vista is not ready for prime time." That is the understatement of the century. Do you want to hear a very funny joke? I bought Windows Vista Ultimate. The WOW starts NOW. Yeah sure. More like when hell freezes over or when I finally buy a MAC. report abuse FireFly: Couldn't have said it better myself reply
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bigphil: Great. Couldn't have done it without the article. I had a couple different issues making it work. After installing XP, the Vista startup repair did not work for me (several unsuccessful attempts). So I installed SP2 for XP and EasyBCD. Running BCD from XP, I ran Manage Bootloader and reinstalled the Vista bootloader. Then booted into Vista and installed BCD and Added an entry for XP.
report abuse Jigga:
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Nice article... thanks a million.
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deryckw: How come there are a couple of guides for installing Windows with Linux and Windows with Windows, but there does not seem to be any on installing Windows with Mac OSX, or is just too easy that a guide is not needed?
report abuse Dan Warne: On a Mac it's very easy with Apple Boot Camp, and on a PC, it's illegal :-)
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reply Nikander: Our computer-genious incestly demanded on the Mac-based InDesign-program and wow what happened; it falls at least three, or four times per day. Mac never falls, ou jee!
report abuse Anonymous1: you, sir are a mac zealot, so go to hell. Any pc can beat any mac performance wise.
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reply APC administrator: That's a ludicrous assertion ... Macs ARE PCs these days. They use exactly the same hardware. It's the software that is different on a Mac.
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reply Anonymous 77: LOL. Sir, a pc is a "collection of parts". You cant say mac is a pc because it does not have a collection of parts you f*****. Why dont you ponder this statement -All pc's are personal computers but all computers are not pc's. =)
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reply Anonymous78: pc stands for personal computer so how is a mac not a personal computer if you use it for personal use its a pc if a pc was a collection of parts it would be called a cop not a pc ponder that
report abuse Anonymous8889: Great discussion, guys keep up the good work!
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stuffman: You sir are pwned. How is a mac not a "collection of parts" like a PC is? Your statement is baseless. The previous poster was 100% correct. Macs are just PCs these days, especially since their departure from Motorola cpus. Apple PCs and notebooks all run out of the production lines in pre-determined configurations, but so do Acer, HP and Dell pcs. Apple's simply have a custom built case which makes them extremely difficult to upgrade - they still source CPUs and chipsets from intel, videocards from ATI and nVidia, and their other components like harddisks and RAM from various manufacturers. The only thing that makes them different, is that the OSX operating system is built for this cut down bundle of "PC" parts to make them "user friendly". report abuse reply Anonymous25: Incorrect, the logic board is still built by Apple. And the logic board does not contain a traditional PC "bios". Intel macs use EFI. Which is 100% incompatible with most PC operating systems. And in the Motorola days, they still used nVidia and ATI video cards and chipsets. So in that you are also incorrect. Macs are still not PC's. BootCamp actually activates a bios emulation routine in the EFI chip. report abuse MacMan: PCs havent been able to keep up with Macs for YEARS now! Do a little research before you open your pie hole! reply
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reply GerryG: Just curious, I haven't been interested in Macs for years since I quit having to maintain them, but isn't OSX just their Unix installation? And how does it differ from Linux? Gerry
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reply anon12182918 (Newbie): Are you dumb? You can get a Mac Pro tower with 2 Intel Xeon 4-core CPUs, 8 slots of RAM (up to 32 GB), up to 4 graphics cards, 4 hard drive slots, and even raid card compatibility...you're way behind the times.
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NickNov80: I dont have anything against Mac. The only advantage over a PC is the Mac OS. Other than that, you get can heck of a lot better performing PC, lower price points and more compatible with more software. Also, when was the last time you seen a Mac built for extreme gaming with an Intel Extreme Quad Core, Three 768MB nVidia 8800GTX and a PhisX Acc. You havent. If Mac is so much better and more secure, why does the Government, NASA & Fortune 500 COs use PC?
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sagan: I got this one. The government use PCs not because they are cheaper, but because the government IT shops resist having to maintain two OS skill sets. Tell a Window admin that he needs to learn howto a maintain Linux or Mac OS X, and he will whine. The first thing a government manager will say is we don't have the resources to train people for a multi-platform environment or there is not enough demand (how could there be). This creates an IT pearl harbor scenario, and there is a general who is pushing for mixed environments. Btw, the government ordered a PC for me that was twice cost of a good Mac.
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Boufont of Pc knowledge : Well I would like to state that all the new macs are way faster than windows etc and your not using alot of processing power and ram running virus software And VISTA RUNS BETTER ON A MAC !!!!!!! So when you buy ur mac all you have to do is use bootcamp and that runs Windows to so two machines in one. Ha ha your still game on your PC and how many hard core (i mean all day) pc gamers are there. something like 2% acourding to stats. Everyone uses consoles like PS3 and Xbox. They are more secure hence the army is switching to them. report abuse reply yellan: I'm a hardcore gamer... I don't play all day long, but all I have for a console is a ps2. and I only use it for guitar hero XD PC's in general have much better hardware cababilities than consoles. I play halo, halo 2, Enemy territory quake wars, and lost planet... Hopefully I can get crysis soon... after I get my second 8800GTX :D you don't see two of them babies in a console lol report abuse reply
Someonelse: Actually, my first computer, that i still have, is a commodore Pet 2001 from 1978 On the front it says in big letters "Personal Computer" Commodore dropped this pc titling after the 2001 model, but was probably the first to use that term for errr a personal computer. It was quite some years after 1978 that Bill Gates got his deal with Ibm to make dos and the term found new use. Because of this fact and the fact that some (combined) words are unescapeably connected to something there is -as far as im concerned- no copyright on the use. The same applies to windows. There were windows (xerox > apple) long before MS windows. report abuse reply
harlz86 (Newbie): Congratulations gentlemen on absolutely out-nerding any pc vs mac argument ever entered into the world wide web. not only was it an argument about wether or not they would install side by side, or which was better but the argument took a twist i have not seen, is a mac a pc. dont get me wrong. im a techie, i hate macs and have mates who are mac techs (if you could call them that) but never has an argument about what is better ever been performed so well, so dramatically. you guys even managed to call an APC ADMIN a f*****.. not to mention the guy who dribbled on about no viruses on a mac. pfft thats because a mac aint worth hacking (p.s. they are out there...) all this aside i dont see how loading xp and vista together turned into an argument that sounds more like a "my dad could beat your dad in a fight" school playground sort of argument. but gentlement well done and thankyou for showing me that most of the people online with ennough time to research this sort of stuff are actually all keyboard warriors. p.s. the only way this argument is ever going to be solved is if bill gates and that skinny sixty year old from apple punch it out in a ring. nerd versus nerd. girly arms flailing, tears rolling. thats the only way a winner will be found. report abuse reply
Steve B.: Hey, as a class exercise, in Computer Engineering, we took up this problem. My teacher had bought a new Dell Inspiron, with Vista preinstalled. Of course, we decided XP was much better, and went to install XP. Having similar problems to everyone else, we were unable to boot up XP itself, and forced onto vista. So we came here, tried most of the solutions using EasyBCD, and failed. We had tried using GParted to move some space, the Laptop came with 99 gig in a Vista partition, 2 gig in an extended *unknown* partition, 45 meg or so in a FAT16 partition (no idea what that is for), and a restore partition (forget the size, I think it was either 4 gig or 10 gig). It now has 49 gig for Vista, 2 gig extended, same for FAT16, and the rest in XP, which is a secondary partition underneath Extended. Rebooted, tried the whole thing again, and failed. After a few more tries with various things, we found that the simple solution in boot.ini was to change the part. # from 5 to 4 (Vista). Very simple solution, that had been overlooked. Might throw more up here on this later, especially if I missed a step. Hope this helps dell users. One last comment: Vista is not backwards compatible with XP, so do not transfer files unless absolutely sure you want to. If your XP dies on a dual boot, as my friends did, you can recover it to Vista, however if Vista dies, and it is not fixable, you are totally screwed. Word to the wise. Steve. report abuse iCorp: it's a good comment Steve B., I'm facing the same problem as you are. I have tried EasyBCD but it still doesn't work. About the "boot.ini" as you've mentioned, could you please explain more about this...how to fix this out? Looking forward to your reply. Thank you. reply
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reply ana: If EasyBCD can't work,you need to scrub your MBR. Basically, boot from a Windows XP CD, enter the "recovery console" and type, delete the "Windows XP" entry, and add a new entry, that will make XP boot. From there, use EBCD to add Vista. software review.
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reply Rich: What do you need to type after entering the recovery console? I think you skipped a word (the most important one).
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rOcKnRoLL: I coppied the Vista's root folder the folder Boot, and the files bootmgr, boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM and ntldr and pasted them to the root of my XP drive. I am using Dell Inspiron laptop, didn't changed anything from the bios settings. I have tried the Vista bootloader Pro to
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reisntall the vista bootloader from the bootloader tab. Still I couldn't fint the word 'reinstall', the tab has 4 or more radio buttons and all i can do is 'install' bootloader and as soon as i reboot my system it ends up in DOS prompting that file is corrupted, I have installed vista boot loader by clicking on a radio button says "All". Now my question is I have done the same trick in my bosses computer (desktop) and nothing unusual happened. Why with my laptop then? I don't wanna uninstall vista os, and i have another partition to install only xp os. But how can I get the bootmenu where I can choose which os to select? i will appreciate your replies. forgive my bad english i am international. report abuse reply
bdon: is this comment after following the direction from this page or is is prior to. Because now im questioning if i should even do a dual boot on my inspiron 1505. when i go to disk management i see 4 partition 1.is a 47 MB healthy 2.is 10 gig Drive D: (primary partition). 3 is C: 100 gig OS partion 4.is a random 2 gig (healthy partition) so im guessing if i wanted to do a dual boot i would have to shrink the 100 gig OS? report abuse Jennifer: I saw Steve's comment on problems with dual-booting Vista and XP on a notebook. I would like to ask some advice. Right now I'm torn between buying an Acer TravelMate 6592G which has a 15 inch screen and XP pre-installed or an Acer TravelMate 7720G with a 17 inch screen and Vista pre-installed. I prefer the 17 inch screen because I'm a graphic designer and this particular model also has a better processor etc. BUT, I use Adobe products that don't run (well) on Vista. My computer salesman said it's possible with the 17 inch model to do a dual-boot for Vista and XP, the bonus is it has two separate hard-drives so I wouldn't need partitions. I am NOT a techie and would try dual-booting myself with the help of a tutorial, hoping all will go smoothly. But is there any guarantee it will run properly, if I do everything right? Can anyone give me some advice? I would really appreciate it! report abuse Anonymous2: http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp try this tutorial and i would go with the 17in if that is what you really want you can just dump vista and install Xp using this tutorial its for a Hp but its the best one to learn how to intregrate the SATA drivers www.nogodforme.com/HPDV6500T.htm i am not that big of a techie and i got it. report abuse reply reply reply
Oooooops!: Ok, so I guess this stuff was a bit too much too chew. I got as far as creating the unallocated space, 2nd partition, on my hard drive. XP install disk does not see any hard drive and cannot continue. (RETREAT!)... but now I can't even reclaim the 73gb hard drive space. a point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. report abuse reply
ChesterCopperpot: Because you CANNOT install OSX on any generic motherboard. You have to buy an Apple pc to install OSX. There has never been a real case of somebody installing OSX on any ol' motherboard! And by the way, it is not illegal to dual-boot 2 versions of Microsoft...read the EULA one more time my friend... report abuse reply IndustrialG33k: I have my Toshiba tri-booting with Fedora Core 6, Windows XP, and Mac OS 10.4.3. This has been possible for a couple years now...
report abuse The Dude: Maybe because Macs are worthless pieces of crapola!
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Craig: Nice article, exactly what I have been searching for. My problem is this PC only came with a "restore" disk and so don't have the option of doing a repair install to fix the corrupt bootloader. Anyone have any suggestions?
report abuse drew: I had the same problem with my Sony VAIO n250e.
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You cannot do this without a vista install dvd. Don't even try or you will be pulling your hair out. Even though theres other forums with information how to do this using vistaboot pro, I could never get that program working. I suggest you have someone download you a torrent of the dvd so you can get yourself an illegal copy. Your Vista key should be on the bottom of your computer. Good luck. report abuse reply
Skippy: You can do it from XP. Install SP2, .NET Framework 2.0, then EasyBCD. Run BCD, click Manage Bootloader. Select Reinstall the Vista Bootloader, then click write. Reboot and it should boot into Vista. From there you can install and run BCD. Click ADD/Remove Entries, and add an entry for XP and save it. That should be it. report abuse Craig: I couldn't boot into anything....Vista or XP. Now I have a copy of Vista so I got the repair done so I can boot into Vista. I downloaded EasyBCD and ran it per instructions. On reboot I get both options: Vista or XP but when I try to boot to XP, I get another error blah, blah, "File: \ntdlr". XP never finished setting up?!?!? How do I get past this? Thanks reply
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reply Reuben: I am having the same problem. The dual boot is set up. I can run vista fine. I keep getting the "File: /ntdlr" is missing or corrupt. Any ideas?
report abuse James: copy ntdetect.com and ntdlr from the /i386 directory on the XP CD to your XP drive, eg, copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\ and copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
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report abuse Cally: Just did that but I get the same error ??
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report abuse KWR: Two issues...
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EasyBCD did not set the boot drive properly after I added an entry for XP while running Vista. So add your entry and then click on "Configure Boot". Select you Windows XP OS under "Entry-Based Settings" and note the drive location. Make sure it's set to C:\. Even though I installed to a D: drive, the ntldr, boot.ini etc, were written to the C: drive. Since vista does not use these files I guess it's ok to put them in the same directory...seems odd to me. At any rate, The boot entry has to be set to C:\ not D:\.
report abuse DW: Changing the drive letter to Point to C: worked (even though XP is installed on F:) Thanx allot... I needed to get this fixed for work
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report abuse TheRealAnonymous: 1: BIG Help >Changing the drive letter to Point to C: >worked (even though XP is installed on F:) >Thanx allot... I needed to get this fixed >for work You need to stop thanxing and alloting and learn to spell.
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report abuse cmoohasdfa: Should the files bec opied to c:\ or f:\?
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Anton Donchev Donchev: This was very, very, very helpfull information. I have no words to say THANK YOU !!! cheers and from meee :)))
report abuse raj shekhar: Hurray, Follow these step my problem is resolved right now i have dual boot system very very thanks
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Canifrou: Great! Thanx to all who helped. To get dualboot out of my new Toshiba laptop w/ VistaHP. I follow the steps of the article (http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp?page=1) and the downloads (EasyBCD). I got the Vista dualboot screen, Vista loaded ok, XP came with a error code re: NTLDR. I used EzBCD redirected XP to C drive and PRESTO! Thank you all. CHAU! report abuse reply
Kevin: I would just like to thank you for that wonderful bit of information. I have been searching all over the web for over 5 hours trying to sort my dual boot system out, and eventually i come across your post about copying the files from the xp disc onto the harddrive and now all is well. YIPPPEEE im so happy now im off to bed. Cheers once again. report abuse ping182nz: Great tips from Skippy....this works great reply
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Heath: Top Tip, running OEM Vista Business with an asus recovery disc, only thing I had to do different was install .net framework 3.0...2.0 didnt work??? after that install easy BCD into XP repair MBR jump back into Vista install easy bcd there too and use as described...BEST TIP EVER!!! report abuse Intrepidman: Thank you so much. Your suggestion worked like a champ! reply
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report abuse RickD43: Thank you, you are a lifesaver. :D Need XP as can't get SQL Server running on bloody F%*ing Vista for some reason. report abuse
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ThomasLHS: Thank you very much, Skippy! You've saved me a lot of trouble. Just spent the past 8 hours re-installing all my programs on XP only to discover I couldn't boot into Vista! Followed your advise and it worked perfectly. Thanks again! Now I can finally get some rest... :) report abuse dicko: Or you could just install MS Virtual Workstation 2007 which seems to run ok under Vista and is free. reply
report abuse Mayclone: According to the MS website, virtual PC will not run with Vista Home Premium or Basic as host!
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report abuse The17thsailor: HA!
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Callak: This is incorrect. I'm running a 64 bit version of microsoft virtual machine on windows vista ultimate 64 bit, but that doesn't help me with my issue since I don't reccomend using a virtual machine to run 3d graphics intensive programs.
report abuse Nemo: I unsuccessfully tried to dual boot with my HP Pavillion Notebook which came with pre-installed Vista Ultimate. I desparately needed to have XP on my machine as I wanted to connect to my work via VPN.
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Nothing worked ... then came trying this with MS Virtual PC 2007... gave me exacly what I was looking for. I can now run Visa as the Host OS and XP as Guest OS. Enjoying best of both worlds.. MS Virtial PC 2007 is highly recommended if you need both OS running in the same machine...
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reply Jazza: I do same on hp dv6589us and works okay but on vpc 2007 cannot use actual video driver, e.g., on a desktop with samsung 22" monitor. but on laptop even though one reason I bought new one was for vista and dual core, etc., with vpc 2007 and xp I can make it look like my old laptop. BTW my new laptop has 4GB RAM so I allocate 2 to xp and could probably do more even.
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Luis: I installed MS Virtual PC 2007 and it is working fine with guess XP Pro, I have Windows Vista Business with 2 Gigas of Ram, and 256 of video ram, but virtual xp only reconize 4 megas !!, but i need more, since i run programas like photohop and corel draw..do you know a way to solve this problem. thank you in advance. report abuse Amit: Hi, My Laptop is preinstalled with Windows Vista Business. Now, I badly need to have XP on my laptop so that I can install a specific software that does not work with vista. Kindly guide me with detailed steps of how can I have Vista as the Host OS and XP as Guest OS using the MS Virtual PC 2007? Appreciate your immediate reply. report abuse rikis: hello, I have (finally) successfully installed (triboot) Ubuntu "Gutsy", Vista "Home Basic" and XP in my Compaq Presario C700. The key here is that Hp does not ship the vista cd's and instead uses a "Recovery partition" so once you install Xp (needles to say that the box came with Vista installed) there was no way to boot back into Vista. At this point there are two options: 1.- Boot into Xp, download and install Easy BCD and fix the Vista Bootloader with the option under the "Diagnostics Center" tab. Or 2.- Dowload and Burn a "Vista recovery CD iso image" and use it instead of the Vista DVD (the one that actually installs the operating system). I had some problem with the first option so I had to use the second... In case you guys are willing to try here is a link http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Repairing+the+Windows+Vista+Bootloader Regars, report abuse reply reply reply
wilkie: i don't get why you need to boot with vista disc just to shrink the drive. can't you just do it within vista's disk management as detailed below?
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http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial133.html#shrink report abuse James Bannan: You can use the embedded tool or the DVD - there's no actual requirement to do it either way. I was just demonstrating the DVD method because it uses DISKPART from within Windows PE 2.0 and is just rather nifty. You could certainly use the GUI or DISKPART from within the OS. reply
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reply Baggy52: One question, how can I use the repair option without a disk? I have a laptop that came with the OS installed, and I am wondering how to get the the boot repaired without a disk.
report abuse JL: I was wondering this myself
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report abuse Frank vd Horst: You don't need the DVD, and you don't need to reboot. Just type diskpart in an cmd prompt and follow the guidelines as described. things will work fine, your system will automaticly reboot, and there you have your new space :-) report abuse
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Wes: I think this is a good step by step guide but I cannot understand why there would be a need to dual boot Vista with XP. If you have installed Vista and for some reason you need XP then you can have that XP install in a virtual environment instead without going the dual boot way. report abuse reply Hagar: Virtual environments have come a long, long way, but the more you work with them, you realize there are some things you just can't expect to do. Especially for a gamer like myself - there's no way you can run a game that won't run under Vista (and there's a bunch at this point) - in a virtual environment. Dual-booting gives you full native access to either O/S with no simulation layers and problems to get in the way. I've been doing it this way since Windows 95 and NT 3.51 - and there's no better way to go! report abuse JimmyConga: Gaming under Vista is pretty bad at the moment. That is one excellent reason to keep a native partition of XP on hand... reply
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Nigel: Vista's support for WPA Enterprise wireless support is broken, and I don't think XP would be able to associate to APs from within a VM.
report abuse stevecaseyo: because if a hardware device doesnt work in vista, you can not get it to work through virtual machine in vista.
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Robert C.: I have been trying to dual boot for about 2 weeks now. i bought a windows vista computer and i wanted to put xp on the 2nd partiioned hard drive. i have been able to install XP but never knew how to get back. i ended up having to reinstall vista a few times. without this guide i would be racking my brain still. i just wanted to say thank you for the guide. It is very well done and very informative. report abuse reply gandhammadhav: I have window vista in my system.Now i want to install the XP on the same system.Could you please guide how to install it.
report abuse rivencole: um you could try READING the above article
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mansart: I bought a brand new Vista system and installed a second drive with the intention of installing XP on the second drive for dual boot. However, I can't even get the XP installation started. When I try to boot to the XP DVD it gets past all the loading of files and right up to "starting windows" and then I get a blue screen that says "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer...". The only English in the "technical information" part of the message is "pci.sys". Has anyone encountered a problem like this? Any suggestions for getting past it? report abuse reply
Anonymous89095: yes. i have this problem as well, at least the "blue screen" with a message about "pci.sys" on a new Dell Inspiron 9400 with Vista Home Basic preinstalled when trying to boot from an XPPro CD (trying to setup a dual boot Vista / XP installation) not from the installation DVD. Dell support is kind of sketchy on the answer. The actually advised me to look for Internet articles like this ?!? and seemed to indicate this is Vista protecting itself from low-level viruses - but that seems odd that it would do it this way. i really hate microsoft products and only keep this OS because i am sure i will have a bunch of problems with the hardware and my favorite linux distro.
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kblade: hey did you ever figure out the solution to your problems loading xp pro on to your system with vista pre-installed already? i am still having the same problem with the pci.sys error
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reply imbobbychild: i had the same problem on a new dimension 9200 but the answer is simple, xp doesnt come with SATA drivers. i got the drivers from dell's website, put them on a flopy and during the initial xp set up presed F6 to enable me to load the drivers and it then worked fine. hope it helps you.
report abuse Ales: So... What do you do if you don't have a floppy drive? I think I'm stuck.
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reply John: I got around this by "borrowing" the floppy drive from any other PC, connecting it to my machine. Then go into Bios at bootup by pressing F2 or Del, and enable the floppy drive, save and exit. When all this works you can return the FDD to its mother machine. You should disable the FDD in Bios on your PC so it doesn't hang up trying to boot from a nonexistent drive. This worked for me. Just don't turn on the donor PC while the FDD is missing.
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Ales: I don't have another computer to borrow a floppy drive from, so I'm still stuck in that case. BUT I stumbled across something that *might* work in its stead: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ I'll have to give it a go this weekend when I have time to kill. report abuse reply
nsz: Hi, I had the same issue on my T60. The solution is either to have and usb floppy drive or to look in the bios for an option to change SATA settings. In T60's bios there was an option to change SATA from AHCI to Compatible mode - after changing to compatible then the XP recognized the HDD. report abuse makdaddy: HELP !!!! ...im having the sata issues with my FSC Amilo Xi2528.. nothing i have tried has worked so far. I have tried the Nlite boot disk including the sata drivers from my drivers support disk .. the xp install still see's no Hdd I have tried changing the Bios setting.. bs default they were set to compatible ( and there wasnt an option to change this, it was greyed out ) I dont have a floppy drive I found some intel sata drivers for my notebook on the FSC website but they are wrapped up in an exe file. I really need to get xp running as Vista home premium is utterly useless to me at the moment report abuse reply reply
HakonBingen: I could not get xp installed on a brand new inspiron 9400. Kept getting the BSOD with complaints about the pci.sys driver. So I made a SP2 cd from my old one using this link. That solved my problem.
report abuse anandsmailbox: Hi,
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I am exactly facing the very same issue. Any solutions found for this problem ? . My HP DV2000 laptop is pre-installed with Vista home premium, and I use the shrink option to create an additional partition. Then, when I try to install WIN XP, after the "starting windows" point, a a blue screen appears with the words "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer...". Can anyone help me to fix this ? report abuse lionhead: fixed! i have a hp pavillion a1740n. i didnt like vista, reinstalling with xp. apparently the problem is that the computer is newer than the xp. change bios to boot from dvd/cdrom. do a fresh install. it will ask to install raid/scsi drivers, press f6. but since the hp 1740n was made for vista, there is no support for thr xp drivers. to bypass this, you need and ide hard drive & ide cdrom. detached cable from serial hd & serial cdrom. then go to bios settings and disable the serial controller. use only the ide controller for now. xp will now install without the blue error screen. xp will install but missing drivers. use temporary pci nic with availble xp drivers to get online. once online, use driver magician v3.19+ to update drivers. now update remaining drivers with device manager, update online. restart, reattch serial drives & serial controller, reenable serial controller in bios, update drivers in windows. and then use the windows update( will authenticate) to update rest of drivers. only downside is now your xp is on an ide drive. and serial drive is a secondary drive. but that was fine for me, i just removed the serial hard drive altogether and used it in my other faster computer. also removed the temporary pci nic & ide cdrom. the hp a1740n now consists of: winxp, 1 ide hd, 1 serial dvdrom. reply
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engo: Hello there, does it works on XP 64? im ok with the vista boot recover and with easyBCD but xp just wont load (blank screen) after selecting boot. Playing arround with BCD I noticed (in the view settings TAB) entry #2 this: Name: Windows XP BCD ID: {2c82aa72-cb94-11db-8660-0015f2e6ae3c} Drive: C:\ Bootloader Path: \ntldr Windows Directory: Although i put D when creating the entry it's still on C, so I changed the drive to D:\( in configure Boot TAb)which is the xp64 boot drive, but nothing happens. Is there a problem with NLTDR? or the blank windows directory (I was unable to change it on easyBCD). THANKS!!!
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Joao C.: I bought a computer with the Windows Vista Premium Home OS (Portuguese version) already installed. However I have programs that run only in Windows XP. I used this tutorial to install a dual booting, starting with the Gparted to create a new partition. When I finished installing Windows XP (English version) I noticed that I only see a C:, which I believe has the Windows XP OS. This is not what I read in the tutorial, as they mentioned that after rebooting I should see the two partitions, one with the Vista and the other with the XP. Any suggestion? The "Fixing the corrupt bootloader" will be enough to fix this? Thank you so much for any help. Joo report abuse reply
Weirdbiz: I've tried to follow the instructions here and I'm getting caught up in XP install... it doesn't seem to be recognizing any of my drives and then it gives me a blue screen of death and the following error : Setupdd.Sys - Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_Area ... I looked up this error and it seems to all be RAM problems... but since my computer runs perfectly fine with Vista... why would this be? Here's some of my back story: I'm trying to install Windows XP Home... my vista version is Home Premium... I'm trying to create a dual boot for XP because some of my hardware/software isn't compatiable with Vista (I've tried the Virtual thing, it doesnt work for what I'm trying to do) ... my computer is a brand new Gateway 5408.. 320 GB harddrive, intel core 2 duo processor (1.8 Ghz), 3 GB ram (I added 2 GB .. Vista is recognizing all of it and running smoothly) ... the guy that sold me XP Home said that XP Home would only recognize 2 GB ram... could this be my problem?
report abuse Slaphappy: Try taking out the 2GB RAM and trying again to see if that's the problem.
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gioggio82: I am in the same situation too... My computer is a brand new HP, 2Gb ram, 160Gb Hd, Intel Core 2 Duo with Vista Home Premium preinstalled, I tried to follow the instructions, I make a 20Gb partition with Gparted but when insert the Xp Professional install-cd I receive a blue screen with this error "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in you computer" Can someone help me??? report abuse Atif Azhar: Hi, Just go to your BIOS setup and disable the SATA Native support. Disable this option and windows XP will detect your hard drive. CHEERS! report abuse reply DSchwa: I'm having the same problem, once I get the hardrive partitioned and insert the XP cd I get a blue screen that says Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer, could I please get some detailed help how to fix this thanks. reply
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reply eryka: Running a brand new Gateway laptop went through the tutorial up tot he installing of XP... I get the whole HD not detected error as well, and I do haev a SATA HD..... here is my issue... I do not have a floppy drive, obviously becuase it's a laptop, so I cannot use the F6 feature to install the sata drivers, which I currently have on CD... any ideas? Please help. I bought this laptop because i will be in the hospital for a while and I need to work, but my work VPN doesn't work with Vista...
report abuse Dennis: I just got onto this site, so this may be really late... I got around the issue of XP not finding my hard drive by creating a custom windows XP install CD using nLite freeware (nliteos.com) Download or locate hard drive drivers and use nLite to add these drivers to the XP install software. Then boot using new custom CD. All worked after this. report abuse metttin: so if i have a wd hd all i have to do is fint drives for wd and add them to the xp installer like u said?
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report abuse susu: In the BIOS settings u have to disable the SATA support for the Hard disk. Then u will be able to install XP.
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report abuse Bill: I had a similar problem --go to BIOS and make sure sata hard drive is disabled---it can't see XP with SATA enabled
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Weirdbiz: I did some more research on my problem and I found some people saying that XP doesn't have the driver for SATA II and that I would need to press F6 at the beginning and load the driver for my harddrive... if so I'm not quite sure how to go about doing that... anyone have any suggestions? report abuse reply
Weirdbiz: I thought of another possible solution to my problem and I wanted to ask some of the experts here if it's possible before I go to the trouble of doing it (because it would be some trouble) ... What if I add another harddrive to my system that I know windows XP can recognize? I have a 250 GB western digital IDE harddrive sitting around - could I just add that to my system and then install windows xp on it? Or can I not have different harddrive types on the same system? report abuse reply
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CJ: That's never worked for me. But you can put a new hard drive in and make it your master, then partition it with two partitions. Then install XP FIRST and Vista second. You end up with an easy clean dual boot without all the hassle. The format the original HD, that you've made a slave, for storage. Or just leave Vista on it, for sometime down the line when you want to only run Vista. You'll alredy have clean installation. Just make the HD your master. report abuse reply Pula: If you already have XP installed and want Vista also you need Dual boot. For Dual boot you need to partition your C: drive first and then install Vista over XP and select partition different than where your XP installation is.
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waswas: installing XP and Vista onto different drives is possible as I have done this myself. I did however install XP first onto one drive and then Vista on the other drive. Vista created it's own duel boot. When you look at the drive lettering, the XP is labled D with a (C) beside it eg D:(C)and Vista has C:(D). I think that when the Vista duel boots into the operating system, the one you pick will always show up in explorer as C drive and the other system shows up as D drive report abuse reply
Jack: This has all worked for me up until the point where I need to select which operating system I want to boot in. I get the options Vista and XP, vista loads fine but XP will not load. See the following link which is a picture of what I am trying to say! My Picture Please help! It must be something easy? I am nearly there! Thanks alot guys, jack. report abuse Jack: In my picture above, which windows disk does it mean will fix it? The XP disk or the Vista disk? Thanks guys. report abuse reply reply
mansart: I get the same screen when I try to boot into XP, but my situation is even worse because Vista won't load either. If I choose Vista the computer just reboots and then goes into Windows Error Recovery. I try using the repair tool but it says it is unable to repair the system. I assume it's just a problem with the bootloader but I don't know how to fix it at this point. Can anyone help? report abuse mansart: I was able to find a solution to the XP \ntldr error. Fortunately it's very simple. You can find the solution here: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm#b Now if I can just get Vista booting again I'll be a happy camper....suggestions anyone? report abuse Paul: this tutorial was great i now have my dual boot up and running but wondered could i do another shrink on the original vista held drive it has too much space for what i need and i would like to partition again reply reply
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Randyharv: I have a new dell notebook with vista preinstalled, I need to dual-boot xp so i can use Rockwell software. My disk 0 is as follows: -:Partition1 [fat] 47mb, d:partition2 (backup) [NTFS] 10gb, c:Patition3 [NTFS], unpartioned space (followed instructions from above), F:partition4 [unknown] 2gb. When i got to the part of the xp install that asked, "to setup winxp on the selected item, press ENTER" i chose the unpartitioned space and hit enter, then i get this message that reads, "Setup cannot create a new partions in the space you selected because the maximum number of partions already exists on the disk" I hit enter again and it takes me back to the previous page. I don't know what to do now. report abuse reply CJ: Format your hard drive with two partition 3/5 and 2/5. Install XP first, on the slightly smaller partition. Then install Vista on the remaining partition. It's very simple. If you need extra storage space, install a second hard drive. You'll have a nice clean system, that should last you for years, without doing anything else to your O/S. Doing it this way will add years to your life, and avoid premature graying. If your system didn't come with a O/S recovery DVD, you can obtain one from the manufacturer. I suggest that, for many reasons, but mostly the added years and premature graying. report abuse laurens: At first I want to thank you for this great tutorial. I was lucky to find it because it was exactly what i needed... Now I have my 2 operating systems installed with the vista bootloader showing "windows vista" (1) and "windows XP" (2) Unfortunatly when choosing "Windows XP" I get an '/ntldr' error. Vista works fine. Can somebody help me out? Thanks in advance report abuse reply reply
laurens: First, thanks a lot for the tutorial, it is exactly what I needed.. I installed both OS and the vista bootloader displays "windows vista" and "windows XP" but when choosing "windows XP" I get a '/ntldr' error Vista works fine (luckily). Anybody can help me out? Thanks a lot in advance! report abuse reply
laurens: First, thanks a lot for the tutorial, it is exactly what I needed.. I installed both OS and the vista bootloader displays "windows vista" and "windows XP" but when choosing "windows XP" I get a '/ntldr' error Vista works fine (luckily). Anybody can help me out? Thanks a lot in advance! report abuse laurens: I'm sorry for the triple post (please remove the first 2) reply
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I have found this tutorial above with the following steps but I wonder if this will affect my vista installation, which is the most important of course... Or is there an other way to solve the ntldr error...? Advice appeciated. Windows XP users 1.Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer. 2.When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key. 3.Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows. 4.Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password. 5.Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "E". This letter may be different on your computer. copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\ copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
6.Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot. report abuse reply
James: I have tried the steps outlined to dual boot Vista Ultimate and XP Professional. However, I soon get errors from Vista that the file system is corrupt and chkdsk should be run. When I run chkdsk for Vista, it eventually will not complete -- saying that there is not enough space to rewrite the MFT. Vista will still boot, but the file system appears to become more corrupt until eventually Vista will not boot at all and running the Vista repair utility reports that the problem cannot be repaired. report abuse laurens: update: When trying the tutorial above, windows XP setup loads but then I got a blue screen . "Windows setup closed..." Vista's still ok, XP, no clue. Who can help me out...? Thanks reply
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Primus: I had also ntldr error. Then I copied ntldr and ntdetect.com on c:\ drive. Than I got hall.dll error, when tryed to access windows XP. Here is solution: Put windows Xp CD in. Choose "r" for repair, choose number where you have windows XP and type admin password(when not, yust press enter). Now type "attrib /scan" You see now, where is your XP installed(on my computer was [3] d:\WINDOWS). Then type "attrib /rebuild" and for numbers, where are no XP installed choose "no" On number, where is windows XP choose "yes" and that's it. Type "exit" That works for me:))) report abuse laurens: Thanks a lot Primus... I'll try that but I had a blue screen when xp setup was loading from cd... Is there a solution maybe via Vista reply
report abuse demarcheur: I think the command you used was bootcfg /scan and bootcfg /rebuild
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reply Beniled: Yep it was bootcfg /scan and bootcfg /rebuild. And it worked like a charm. If you get an error about hal.dll this is the fix.
type bootcfg /scan then type bootcfg /rebuild type y next to the correct installation then hit enter twice when asked about loader options voila XP installation should resume on next reboot. report abuse reply
wittles371: i have one of those acers that has disk to disk recovery and i cant go into repair for vista is there any other way i canr epair vista or is there any where i can get a illegal copy of vista that i wont fully install just use to repair the boot sector??? i dont want an illegal copy of vista i just need it to repair my boot. report abuse reply laurens: You just have to download a copy of vista (torrents, newsgroups, limewire, whatever) or loan it from smb else, preferably in your only language. Write this as an image on a dvd and boot from that.
report abuse StanyD: Excellent guide to dual booting Vista and XP with Vista installed first.
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However I too had the missing /ntldr error. To fix it firstly I copied ntdetect.com and ntdlr from the /i386 directory on my XP CD to the root of the drive where XP is installed. This still gave the same error message. Then I checked the settings (Overview) in EasyBCD and noticed that it didn't specify the Drive. Therefore the XP bootloader didn't know where to look for ntldr! I then clicked on Configure Boot and clicked on the dropdown for Entry Based Settings and selected "Microsoft Windows XP Professional". The Drive had the entry "Deleted partition" I changed this to my XP drive letter which is G:\ and saved settings. This allowed XP to boot successfully.
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reply Tjompen: I installed Vista Build 6000 on first partition, XP on the second from a Ghost-image (had it on partition 2 on the drive I copied it from therefore no need to edit the boot.ini file), used this guide and the EasyBCD 1.52 and made my Windows XP entry, putting the drive letter to C: for both. Then the Ntldr error came, googleed and tried every trick on the net, changed the C: to D: etc but the solution for me was to copy the files ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com from the XP-partition to the Vista-partition. You will have make the system files visible to find them. Now the problem is no more. Now both Vista AND XP boots perfectly.
Hope this helps all you out there with the same problem. report abuse wie (Newbie): Where did you put the ntldr boot.ini and ntdetect.com files on the Vista partition? reply
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Tjompen: I cant get it to work, still gets the ntldr error. XP is working because when I go to the disc utility and set, in my case D:, as active partition (D:=XP) and then restart my XP loads without problem and when I want to return to Vista I do the same in XPs disc utility, setting Vista as active partition. How to get the loader to find the ntldr... tried everything I have found on the internet... report abuse reply
RayBlane: I managed to successfully dual-boot Vista and XP. My Laptop was supplied with Vista pre-installed but I have 2 hard-drives and installed XP on the second. I used OSL2000 to manage booting. This worked well for over a month and then for no apparent reason when I booted into Vista one day it ran the diskchecking utility (chkdsk). It found some errors on my D drive (XP drive) and proceeded to repair them. Some four and a half hours later (after replacing "invalid" security descriptors) Vista booted. But the D drive was inaccessible and was reprted as having 0 bytes free of 0 bytes. Sure enough when I tried to boot into XP it failed. Has anyone experienced a similar problem? Does anyone know why chkdsk should do this? report abuse reply Jacques: Hi everyone. I tried to use this article to create a dual boot on my computer. The first part went good. The second partition has been created but when it came to restart the system afer installing XP, I got the message Erro to load operating system. System in not loading vista either. I tried to repair the boot sector usig repair start up with Vista DVD but it reports no problem to repair. No longer able to boot my system...still gettin error to load operating system and nothing happens. SOmebody can help? Ill be very happy to get help. Thousands of thanks. JC
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Sam: I installed xp fine. When I put in the vista dvd to repair the bootloader for vista, after running startup repair, vista says it found nothing. Now I cant get into vista anymore. Is there another way to get into vista? from the command prompt maybe? HELP!!! report abuse fgfhgdfghdfbndfgbndfyfdgnb: i haev the same problem, now it says, error laoding operating sustem, adn NEITHER work, please help reply
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Jeremy: Very good tutorial, except I might suggest that the author go back and add the bit about the ntldr. Kind of a critical step for most users. Especially seeing how the replies to this article keep asking about how to solve the issues. To do the job manually (entering XP into your Vista boot record), Microsoft has a page on it's support site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529 report abuse reply seawyfe: I followed your instr. but XP only shows one part. Drive 0 If I select it it wants to format it. I don't want to format it if Vista is on that partition and I can't find out. It indicates all of lthe bites are free. Please advise. report abuse reply
Jacques: Hi everyone. I just want to say that the solution to the problem when we get the error message ERROR LOADING OPERATING SYSTEM is to remove Vista from drive, reinstall XP and than follow the procedure for Dual boot when XP is installed first. To remove VISTA boot from DVD, go to install proceedure and when you see the partitions use disk options and delete all partitions shut down and reinstall XP. Make sure to do a back up before. Good luck. JC
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gfdghdytfhbdfghdxfythd: i fixed it. if u had the problem, 'error loading operating system'. i fixed it by installing vista on the other partition, OVER the XP one. it told me xp will go in a folder called windows.old and that i cant sue it, go ok, now in the load screen it says would u like to load vista or vista? try one and if it asks about making log in names, reset ur computer, and go to the other one. it should log in fine and everything should be as it was before. from there since ur in there now, u should back up ur files before u try formatting that partition with the new vista and old xp 'what i am currently doing right now' im only doing the format thing right now so dunno if itll not making everything die again, but do what i said up top to get back INTO vista so u can backup everything report abuse up the creek w/o OS: I am getting "error loading operating system" when trying to boot Vista and the startup repair isn't finding an error. I canceled the install of XP because I couldn't see the 50gig partition I shrunk for it. reply
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Tjompen: I installed Vista Build 6000 on first partition, XP on the second from a Ghost-image (had it on partition 2 on the drive I copied it from therefore no need to edit the boot.ini file), used this guide and the EasyBCD 1.52 and made my Windows XP entry, putting the drive letter to C: for both. Then the Ntldr error came, googleed and tried every trick on the net, changed the C: to D: etc but the solution for me was to copy the files ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com from the XP-partition to the Vista-partition. You will have make the system files visible to find them. Now the problem is no more. Now both Vista AND XP boots perfectly from the Vista boot loader. Hope this helps all you out there with the same problem.
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reply lp: I can't find the files; ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com on the XP partition but I do see them on my Vista drive. Because those files are always installed on your primary drive, and this is vista for me. So did you meant copy it from the vista drive(C:) to the XP drive (D:)?! If not what can I do then? Thanks
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Tjompen: Well, since I had a ghost image and did not install XP the normal way (I installed the Vista normaly) The NTLDR ended up in the XP-partition as it should. If the ntldr and the other files are found on the vista partition copy those to the xp as well.(Read my post for what three files) Think this should work. I have the three files on both partitions. A warning though, when I today updated my XP with IE7 the installation connected the Vista-partition with the XP and I ended up with a mix and the next time I opened Vista there was trouble. Suddenly the C-drive in Vista was the XP-partition...well my computer got fucked up...To the question if I put C: on both Vista and XP, Yes I did. Why this happened I dont know, my skills end right there...for now. report abuse reply lp: Ok, thanks a lot Tjompen, but as you say your computer got f*cked up i'd be better not try the 'copy-the-3-files-trick'? Or wasn't that the reason, was it because you have pointed for both OS to C:\? I just really don't wont my vista installation to get messed up! Torenada, how have you done it? Or didn't you had the ntldr error? report abuse reply Tjompen: The reason for the f*** up was the installation of IE7 when I was in XP-mode. But since I had backed up my partitions with the Vista backup found on Ultimate I could save most of my work...
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lp: I have copied the files (ntdetect and ntldr to the XP partition) but now I get the hal.dll error! I'm almost there... Who can help me out? Thanks in advance
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reply Tjompen: You need to copy the boot.ini-file as well AND make sure that it is pointing to the position of the XP-partition. I have read that a faulty boot.ini gives the Hal.dll error
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lp: Thanks. I thought it had to be because it didn't copied/find the boot.ini file. Anyway, I don't find this file on my Vista nor XP partition. After all I read/heard/experienced I start to doubt the use of this dual boot. As you said some installations copy their files to the vista partition program files folder, often over vista files. Also there is more chance of screwing up your OS/software/hardware or eventually loose your files. For me personally, i don't like messing up my brand new (pretty expensive) system... Would you rather recommend the dual boot experience or advice me to delete the XP partition and forget about it now no harm has been done yet...? Cheers report abuse reply
Tjompen: Well, I find it impossible to have only Vista due to lack of drivers for my tv-card, graphic-card etc. I have now run my dualboot for a few days without the problems I had earlier so I am happy to be able to have them both. The importent thing is to make a backup of the XP with Ghost or Acronis or whatever program you prefer for imaging you drive and then use the backup in Vista to make a image for Vista. If something goes wrong it does not take that long time to restore. For me it took less than 40 minutes to restore the computer. Now that I know how it shouldnt take more than 25 minutes but I do not expect more hassle... report abuse reply
lp: I thought I was saved (maybe I am) but I can't find the files anywhere! Where did you find them? (the system files are set visible) And you just copied them from your D: XP to your C: Vista drive? For the bootloader you have also vista pointing to your C: and XP to your D: (or also to C:?) Thanks in advance! report abuse reply
Oppy: Just got my new Gateway NX570X Laptop in the mail yesterday and have spent atleast 12 hours trying to get this thing to dual boot, the problem is it doesn't reconize any harddrives when getting to the screen of which harddrive to install it on. Iread about changing the settings BIOS setup and disable the SATA Native support and I can't seam to find it, I would assume you were talking about the Bios settings when you hit F2 on start up but not seeing where you can disable it if anyone could please help it would be appreciative, I did partition the hard drive and I want to load xp pro with my vista. report abuse reply
Torenada: After many many days of working on this, I finally got my dual boot of Vista and XP to work. However, now when I am logged into XP, it does not see a network connection, so I have no internet. I have tried to ping the router and do ipconfig but it does nothing. Any ideas on how I can get internet back on xp? report abuse Brad99: I am having the same problem... Have you found anything reply
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report abuse lucas2007: I haven't found any solutions on the internet to solve this?
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report abuse trouble getter: i get same problem!!!help!!!!
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reply sjd: I had the same problem. I put XP Pro on a SONY VAIO with Vista Business pre- installed. In XP everything looked fine except I had no Network Adaptors showing in the Device Manager. Therefore I couldnt get onto the internet or connect to any networks using XP. Through the Device Manager on Vista I found that I had the following Network Adaptors:
Intel PRO/Wireless 394ABG Network Connection and Marvell Yukon 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller. I just did a web search on both of them. The Marvell Yukon search gave me a link to a site where I could download their setup software. I installed the software on XP and it created an entry in Network Adaptors in the Device Manager. I plugged in my network cable and it worked. The Intel search took me straight to a download page on the Intel site. I loaded the software on XP and it also created an entry in the Network Adaptors in the Device Manager. Through Network Connections I created my wireless connection and it worked as well.
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Myth: Hello, I currently am on the windows xp portion of my pc. What i did wrong was not search for info on dual-booting before i fell into my problem. What i did wrong was not partition my drive before i installed windows xp professions sp2 over my windows vista ultimate. I just left filesystem intact and created a new windows folder for example my windows vista is under C:/Windows and xp is under C:/Windows2 . Ok and now the problem. When i boot up the computer, both of the OS boot's say windows xp. I choose the first one it takes me to the windows xp just installed. And when i choose the second one it just leaves me at either a black screen or an error saying file is missing or corrupt. File is hal.dll. How can i fix this problem. I read all the sites on that boot up for vista is different than boot.ini. and i dont know how to work vista's boot up. Currently I am on xp, and dont know what to do. Please help. Thanks. P.S. I download windows vista from microsoft's live marketplace so it wont load up my DVD when i burn the install files to it during boot. What should I do. I can easily reformat and end all the problems, but i have too much important files and information on my vista part that i need. thanks again. report abuse reply
Chuppy: These instructions worked perfectly for me, thanks! After I made the dual boot and logged into Windows XP, I found that I needed drivers for this brand new HP Pavillion. They were not readily available on the HP website. I had to log into their live chat and wait while the person doled them out to me one at a time (via FTP link) over the course of about an hour. Seems like they would have a better solution, but I have my drivers and all seems to be well. report abuse reply George: Hey Chuppy, I was wondering what type of HP Pavilion you had purchased. I myself have the HP Pavilion a1740n... I've successfully dual opp'd my rig except I don't have the drivers for XP. I have no sound, no internet connection,...etc on XP..I was wondering if you could possibly help me out. msn: nightfallfx@hotmail.com Cheers buddy! report abuse Infopumper: DV 9000 Laptop DV9208NR Preinstalled with Vista Home Premium.. Went through other older models within the DV9000 series.. Located all drivers I needed for XP from there.. Make sure the Model you select is within the same series, and have the same Hardware (all the way down to the Processor).. Should be fine from there to aquire the drivers.. BTW.. I want to thank the makers of this page.. reply
report abuse Elvi: Hi Chuppy I bought a HP Pavilion dv6560us notebook and i cant install Xp becouse i havent the HDD drivers. Please can you send them to my email: elvikeco2006@yahoo.com? Thanks, Elvi report abuse mehdi: hi chuppy i have pavilion dv 2530 i do the following instruction but when i logon into my xp i dont have internet connection , no sound , no fingerprint .etc . i hope so someone help me with this i hate vista please help me to get hp pavilion 2530 drives for xp . tanks mehdiphpbb@gmail.com report abuse
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slats: Chuppy: You are the man of the hour for many of us! I finally got dual boot to work on my Pavillion a1744x. I got drivers from HP but still do not have sound or internet. I think I can fix internet with my provider, but don't know how to get the sound up! Which driver controls audio? report abuse reply
BobMelbourne: I have a new system with Vista Ultimate pre-installed by system builder. Wanting to add 200gig IDE Seagate HD already loaded with XP
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Pro. This was Master and only hard disk in a prior system. To date have changed BIOS boot sequence to boot into 2nd HD (with XP) instead of Vista. It goes thru POST etc then displays menu showing start up options..start windows normally.. start in safe mode etc. I choose normal start however it just restarts computer then displaying same start up menu screen again. What do I need to do to make 2nd drive boot up with XP? or suggest other way of allowing Vista and XP on separate drives to work. report abuse martinSyd: Great article - thank you! One quick question: I have installed Vista on a new, larger disk that has been partitioned. XP was running on this machine prior to the Vista install and I would like to transfer my existing XP disk image to the second partition on the new disk. In the article it mentions that the new partition will have the next available drive letter so I suspect that my plan is flawed as all my current programs and setting will try to access the "C:" drive. Is there any way around this? After much config work I'd hate to re-install either OS everything again... Thanks much, Martin report abuse reply reply
lp: I almost 'completed' my bual boot but I'm still saddled with the hal.dll error when I try to start my windows XP. I'm pretty sure it is because I can't find the boot.ini file. Copying the hal.dll file is a bad idea btw. So, can somebody help my with configuring the right boot.ini file? My Vista is (originally pre-installed) on my C: and my XP partition is on the F: partition. So vista is of course my primary OS. What should the boot.ini look like? And where should this file be? Thanks in advance!
report abuse nhall: I am actually having the same problem right now... what did you do to solve the hal.dll issue?
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Jason: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU ...oh and...THANK YOU!! Honestly, this was wracking my brain and I'm so happy that you but together such a thorough how to...you are my SAVIOR!!! Thanks again! JG report abuse Rockhound: planning to get a new lappy(Vista home premium) and install xp pro into it.. well...since its preinstalled...can the given rescue/recovery disk be used to repair vista? plus....the xp pro i have is with sp1...if i install sp2...would it be installed in the vista installed-drive or the xp installed-drive? report abuse reply reply
kmaiti: I was trying to install XP on XPS410 which came preinstalled with Vista. The instruction on this website is absolutely the best to follow. It works perfectly. Two things I would like to add: 1. You can make partitions from Vista itself using drive management tool. 2. If you have one of the new systems with no IDE connections you need to install those drivers via a floppy drive and for me an external usb floppy drive did not work. report abuse Abdeath: Hi. i have vista home preinstalled. I wanted to install xp pro on it. it gives me the blue screen. what do i do? if i need to do something with drivers how do i do that? reply
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reply Chiller: I got passed my ntldr problem by copying the files from CD like what has been said, but now when i attempt to boot into xp im getting an error pointing to system32\ntokrnl.exe telling me it needs replacing. I got this far before and decided to reintall xp but its happening again.
ive googled it, and apparently it can be caused by a currupt boot.ini but i wouldnt know what one of them looks like so, here is my boot.ini(P.S. Location of boot.ini is F:\boot.ini) [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /noexecute=optin /tutag=p55edn /kernel=tukernel.exe
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reply Hagan Walker: The problem with this is that when XP installs, it automatically installs to a C:\ drive. If Vista is on the C:\ drive, dont worry....it won't mess with it. Try this: In Vista, run easyBCD and go to Add remove entries...delete the windows XP entry and click SAVE. Now at the bottom where it says add an entry, add XP, but assign it to the drive C:\! click SAVE, and reboot to see what happens...this should solve your problem....and many others
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kmaiti: I had that same problem. You need to download the appropriate controllers and put them in a floppy drive. during XP install press F6 to specify their location in the floppy. Hope this helps!!
report abuse Anonymous$#: What if I don't have a floppy to load RAID drivers from?
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The shaun: this 'how to' guide was helpful to say the least but, it had missed a few things. I got a hp pavilion 9205ca with vista home premi and no install dvd. the way i got around this for the dual boot is like someone commented above. one you get to the xp install step install .NET framework 2.0 and get easyBCD in there and use its reinstall vista bootloader and click write MBR. Then when you restart you should get your choices between xp and vista. Even better vista will boot up like a pro. Much thanks to all who wrote this guide and who left comments. It was a great help.
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Jared: I received vista business through my school, online. I also have an inspiron e1705 and I partitioned the disk, but it only let me get 9 GB of free space on 100GB of memory (first problem), then I put my old xp media center version in and it says it won't install a system older then the new one which is vista, what do I do for both? report abuse Abdeath: For those of you who get the blue screen while booting xp cd, this might work. I had the same problem. My computer which is new had SATA hard drive. all i needed to do was press F6 in the beginning of booting the xp cd, and specify the RAID-Controlled SATA driver that you get from your manufacturer drivers. This worked with XP SP2 cd, not SP1 but that could just be my cd. Hope it helped. report abuse reply reply
jbo: I guess you don't realize that EasyBCD is based on stolen program code. This is the only reason I can see why you choose to publicize a rip-off program in a respected magazine like yours.
report abuse neilgriffs: great article,wish id read it before trying to instal xp on a free partition,lol
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report abuse mat: when i boot vista to repair it it doesnt find the hdd
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reply Anonymous23456: Everything seems to be fine for me until i need to repair Vista, when i boot from the Vista DVD, it doesnt give me the option to Rapair my computer. Any ideas?
report abuse killer675: Thank you so much, this was such a big help:)
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RPAUL: First of, thanks for the great article and I am one of those stuck with Vista due to a new purchase and abs. must have XP for some of my business software that does not run on Vista. When I install XP (following the steps above), I get the following error after I select the free partition "Drive C is unformatted, damaged or formated with a file system that is incompatible with Windows XP. To continue installing XP, Setup needs to format this drive. - To format this drive and continue Setup, press F1 - To return to previous screen without formating, press ESC" The C drive is the Vista partition and I don't want to loose it, in the hope that someday, Vista will fly. Help ! Thanks in advance report abuse Phil: Hi guys, Could anyone provide me some walkthroughs? I have a HP latop which came with the Vista OEM version on the 1st internal hard drive. I purchased and installed a 2nd internal hard drive on the laptop, as well as installed the XP retail on the second hard drive. However, all I have now is XP whenever I turn on the laptop. How could I fix the issue so that I could have dual OS on this laptop? By the way, if I physically take out the second hard drive, I will not be able to boot up the Vista. Please provide me some steps here. Thank you, guys. reply
report abuse Roman: Hi Phil, I have exactly the same problem with Acer TravelMate laptop. Though I installed XP not on a separate HD but separate partition. Roman report abuse
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chuck: I had followed the procedure above, and got vista and xp booting ok. I was working in xp and downloaded any update for windows xp installed it, i also had installed a few other things like a bluetooth adapter, nero, and some dvd coping software. As usual it prompted me to restart to finalize the updates. I restarted tried to go into vista and it would not let me. It flashes up an error screen for about 1/2 a second, something about if a new camera or other device was installed disconnect and reboot, and then it reboots automatically. I disconnected all my external devices and rebooted, did not help. I tried booting from the CD and repairing the startup and it said it was not able to fix problem. At long last i used my recovery cd and reset the vista partition to new, but when i go to my computer it doesn't show the xp partition. The vista partition is still shrunk. I used BCD and tried to re-add xp to the bootloader and it
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said that ntdlr was missing or corupt. Is there any way to get back to my xp partition, and what did i do wrong to cause vista not to boot up. report abuse reply Chiller: Has anyone got a fix for the system32\ntokrnl.exe problem im having? ive looked up and down the internet for a fix but nothing seems to work. I dont want to use the XP CD to repair my xp install just incase it trys repairing the vista install and kills that too.
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Gurshaan: The author of this article REALLY needs to include a fix for the ntldr message. He should also comment on the fact there are other ways to create partitions. I had the ntldr error, the fix i used was: Making sure bcdedit had my windows xp entry as C: (even though it was actually e: )which is the same place as my vista install. Copied ntldr and ntdetect.com to the c:\ folder. I had to also make a boot.ini file in the same folder. Do this by opening up notepad and entering in
[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /noexecute=optin /tutag=p55edn /kernel=tukernel.exe
Note partition(2) means xp is installe don the second partition of the drive, change this to whatever partition your xp install is on. Observe you must do this twice. Then saving as boot.ini make sure this is the name of the file once saved. report abuse reply chiller: that sounds like something i would like to try however, my install of xp is on another HD rather than on another partition. does this boot.ini still apply for me, or do I have to do it another way?
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reply creomortis: If your xp is on another hard drive you need to modify the lines, so partition(2) would be partition(1) and disk(0) would be disk (whicheverhdnumber) just google it, probably some kinds out there that will tell you exactly what you need to put, i cant say specifically because i dont know your exact setup.
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reply SDG: All above was really helpful and allowed me to get dual boot working perfectly - but only after tearing my hair out for a couple of hours!! Because ... If your XP OS is on another drive, as mentioned above, you need to change the value of the RDISK() setting and NOT the DISK() setting (which should remain at 0)in boot.ini.
Then all should work ....
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Zeeshan: So i made a mistake at the Windows XP partition stage, and i was made to reboot...so when i tried booting to windows XP once more...it didn't let me. It sais "Error loading Operating system" can and one help me on this?
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Karan: Hi everyone. I tried this tutorial and was doing fine until I got to the stage of creating the unallocated space in the vista installation setup. I followed the instructions and shrunk the drive however when i left the Windows PE 2.0 shortcut the unallocated space did not show up on the partition page even after refreshing. So i rebooted the vista setup cd and the unallocated space still failed to show. So I then decided to just boot up vista as normal and I noticed in My Computer that the the unallocated space appeared as a seperate drive even though i hadn't created a partion on the unallocated space yet. This looked suspicious and so I double checked in Computer Management and found that the unallocted space actually exsisted as a partition and appeared as a seperate drive. So then I booted up the XP installation setup and none of the partitions showed up. Please help! Thanks
report abuse WDonohue: This is all great, of course, assuming you HAVE a vista DVD or an XP cd to boot from. Seeing as my system came w/vista preinstalled, and I don't have an XP disc.. it would appear there are no great options for me huh?
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reply raindog: Legally preinstalled OS's will generally have provision to create back-ups, but if you have erased or deleted these then you are on your own. Why don't you have an XP disc and how do you end up with two preinstalled OS versions on one machine?
That said speak with your wallets people any machine not supplied with disc media is either illegal or unsuitable for intended purpose. Do not purchase a machine without Media for the installed OS. Your needs will likely change over time and you will save yourself a lot of future grief.
report abuse Lesley Hibbs: get a life
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John F. K.: I have a pre-installed version of Vista on my new HP notebook. I also have the recovery disc that only allows you to restore the entire system to factory settings which installs vista for you and all of the software in one go. So I have no disk for Vista although I have my Vista serial number. I also am a student of UF (Gators) and we can download a free version of XP or Vista with our own individual license key. The download installs an .iso image file and so I have no XP disk either and everything is perfectly legal! report abuse Anon: Hey. I was fine through the installation of xp, up until the first restart. The computer restarts, and gets to where it should continue with the xp installation, and right after it says press any key to boot into the cd/dvd it says "failed to boot into os." It hangs there until I restart or shut off. I couldn't get into xp or vista at that point. I managed to go back in and delete the xp partition and get back into vista fine. If it matters I am using two harddrives trying to install the os'es on separate drives. When I tried to repair the startup of vista, it asked if I recently plugged in a camara or mp3 player type device, and if I had disconnect it and restart hte computer. I checked the log and it found no errors and said it booted into vista fine. Please help, I really appreciate it! report abuse Tarek: Thanks alotttt guys u made it working.... reply reply
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chrisp27: I bought a new pc with Windows Xp home edition installed and i got a cd with Vista home premium upgrade.When i upgraded to Vista i got a msg saying my graphic card is unsuported, I got a Nvidia Gforce 7600 i downloaded the international Vista driver from Nvidias homepage and when i try to install it i get a msg saying " Ur not using Windows Vista" That s why i want to install Xp too but i get the blue screen saying i have no discs available.Can someone tell me what i doing wrong? p.s i splitted my hard disc to two parts already report abuse reply
lyle256: Help pleasee I want to add a separate hard drive onto my new system which has Vista on hd. I want the extra hd to have XP pro on it. Please tell me way/s of making this work having it as dual boot procedure. Vista is loaded currently. Thanks in advance for help on this. report abuse reply
John J. Spikes Jr.: I followed all of your directions to a "T", though I have two 250Gb hard drives so I set up an OS on each. It allowed me to completely setup my XP installation on the D: drive, but now when I boot into XP, I can't use my Logitech mouse or keyboard. Both are cordless and connect to the PC through a sender unit plugged into a USB port. As soon as XP starts booting the lights go out on my sender unit. XP recognized both just fine throughout the entire installation. Any ideas? report abuse reply hoffman: i was doing the duel boot and i made the second partion and went on to install xp i loox and it showed there was no unusued space i went back into vista and the 60 gigs i was going to use for xp are gone report abuse reply
Scotty: I installed Network 2.0 and then did the BCD thing from XP to get Vista working and it succefully loaded up. I then installed this in Vista and added XP in the bootup section and now when I load up the comp, I get the choice between XP and Vista, and both work fine. Just make sure you set both OS's to drive C. report abuse reply
Geoff123456: I get to the step where you switch to the XP disc, but XP doesn't see the unallocated space, which shows up fine in the Vista install, 22 GB unallocated on Drive 0, 211 or something on the first partition. XP just sees the reduced amount of partion 1, no unallocated space. The only differences I can think of between this article and my situation is I'm trying to use my original XP Home upgrade CD, so I have to put the Windows ME upgrade CD in first to unlock it. Do I have to use XP Pro? Does it have to be a full CD version, not an upgrade? Does it have to be SP2, not an original XP CD? report abuse Towtol: I initially had Vista Ultimate installed with Bitlocker encryption enabled using a USB flashdrive (C:\ and S:\ on the hdd). I created a partition (X:\)and loaded XP onto it. I found your guide after I realized that I didn't have the ability to dual boot. I get to the Systems Recovery Options part of your guide and there isn't an OS to select from. I decided to click on "next" anyway. When I rebooted I got "a disk read error has occurred - press ctrl+alt+del" error message. Pressing ctrl+alt+del reboots my system and takes me back to the same error message. At this point I can't access Vista or XP. Using my Vista DVD, I tried to reinstall Vista but the software won't let me install to the same partition I had it on previously (it recognizes that it is encrypted with Bitlocker). I was able to reinstall XP to the partition I had originally created for it. I have tried EasyBCD and VistaBootPro from inside XP but neither recognizes that Vista is installed on my hdd in order to reinstall the Vista bootloader. I would like to gain access back to my original installation of Vista instead of having to delete that partition from inside XP. reply
I have 2 gut feelings: 1. This problem has something to do with the original S:\ being created by enabling Bitlocker and my USB flashdrive. 2. I get to use Patition Magic and reinstall Vista. I intially wanted to have XP as part of a dual boot for the sole purpose of gaming.
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If there is anything anyone can think of to help with this situation, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
report abuse DaKhaa: "Boot from the Vista DVD and on the screen where youre prompted to Install now, select Repair your computer." I got my new PC today, with Vista pre-installed. No Retail DVD, just a "recovery disc". Can I dual boot with this too? report abuse Towtol: You might be able to if your recovery disk has the files on it mentioned in this Mcrosoft article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529.
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report abuse AppleBag: I have Vista Premium (installed first) on my main system SATA drive. And I have XP on a second IDE drive. I have copied the Boot folder and the file bootmgr from Vista to the XP root drive, as well as copied ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com from my XP (SP2) installation to the root of my Vista drive. After restarting, I can get into Vista fine. I restart and select XP, and I just hang forever at a black screen?
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Once I hit the restart button on the computer after that and try to login to Vista, Startup Repair kicks in sayig it didn't start right last time and ask's me to repair (doesn't mention what it's going to do). I click cancel, it does some other "attempting repair" progressbar for ages, then I end up with a Send Error or Don't Send Error screen. I click don't send and then Continue, and I boot up just fine into Vista again. Another interesting note: If I boot the pc with my patched to SP2 XP install disk, it will load into XP. Anyone know what to do? Thanks in advance for any help!
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reply AppleBag: Thought I would post what I did to fix my particular issue, in case someone else has this problem down the road and comes here: What I did was, I edited the boot.ini on both roots from rdisk(0) to rdisk(1) (4 instances) and now both Vista and XP load up fine from the bootloader.
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ihpsn: i was wondering if there was a way to extend the xp partition after it is installed. i kinda want more space on my xp partition now =p
report abuse HaiiiIii: hmm the situtation that am in has mayby nothing to do with the boot. anyway here it goes. the trouble is when i start Vista my resolution is like the lowest so i need to change it for my own settings and when i boot Xp its the same setting as last time. does anybody know what am doing wrong or what the probleem is, thanks in advance report abuse
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Bill Irwin: Hi - great article. Built a new PC, installed Vista Home Prem, had issues with old sw/peripherals, so installed XP Pro on another drive, set up dual boot as described here with BCD. Works brilliantly. Now have decided I can do without Vista completely, would like to delete the partition it is in. I have BCD in the Vista partition though, so want to know if there are any traps if I: 1. disable dual booting via bcd in vista (C) 2. boot to XP in D:/ and use disk management to delete Vista (c:/) I'm hoping that the XP part will now become c:/ - is it that simple? i suspect there could be a big stuff up! Any pointers appreciated, Bill report abuse reply Applebag: I would just use an Imaging tool like Acronis True Image, make an image of your XP partition. Then just put it on top of Vista (it will completely overwrite it sector for sector). Just need to make sure you have the Vista drive set as the system boot drive in the Bios. After that (if necessary) just use the /fixmbr feature of the XP boot disk, and format your first XP drive for the extra space or whatever you want to do with it.
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reply Bill Irwin: hey thanks, that sounds like a simpler option. I'm using Ghost for backups so *should* be able to restore my XP partition to the Vista one right? The only thing that worries me is all the paths set to D:/ by various software installed... might be a bit of tidying up to do afterwards. Bill
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David Provost: Just took delivery of a new Dell XPS 410, and prepping to make this system dual boot. One thing I notice is that the system currently has a
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D: drive that is set as the recovery partition. Is there a way to designate space on the C: drive for this purpose so I can use D: as my XP boot partition? Between the partitions on the hard drive, a second hard drive and two optical drives, its just alot of drive letters to be shuffling with. Any thoughts or suggestions from the other readers of this forum are greatly appreciated.
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reply Applebag: There should be some program that came with the Dell to make a recovery cd out of the recovery partition. You could try making the cd to be safe, and then just formatting that partition for your double boot.
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reply David Provost: That would be a good idea, since everything I'm reading tells me that partition takes you back to INITIAL state, no need to keep it on the hard drive when a CD copy will do, thanks. I'll look to see if there's a utility that came with the machine.
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Troy: I just scanned through the previous comments and didn't see anything about something I have been considering. What I was thinking of doing was installing XP onto a second HD but first I was thinking about disconnecting the current HD with Vista then connect new HD, install XP then plug Vista drive in. Can anybody tell me if this will work and what I may need to do to make it work. report abuse reply chhuck12: I tried this. I installed Vista on a SATA drive, disconnected it. Plugged an IDE drive in, installed XP. This method worked perfectly, but NO boot menu/manager, when you boot you always have to change the hard drives priority to choose which OS you want to use. After days trying to find an issue, nothing worked. I uninstalled all my OS, reinstalled XP first on my IDE (because SATA is not comptatible with it first versions of XP). When the XP finished installing, booted from de Vista CD without changing the hard drive priority. Let your second hard drive without any partition until you're in the vista install menu, let Vista partition its own way. Remind that your hard drive priority have to stay the same...the XP first and Vista second. report abuse reply
David Provost: following these instructions worked like a charm. Just a couple anomolies. The first was that even though I created a new partition on the primary hard drive (using vista) and set up the D: drive for XP, that partition was seen as F: by the XP install. Now my XP has system installed on F: (not really a big deal) Second issue, I may have selected the wrong option when update the SATA BIOS. Now when I reboot, the bios waits about 20 seconds for me to hit CTRL-I to set up the RAID on my two sata drives. I dont want run these as raid, so I just let it time out. Anyone have thoughts on who I can revert this BIOS setting (I *think* its a bios issue anyway) report abuse reply
David Provost: Figured out my last problem, it was the boot order of devices, I had put the SATA/RAID controller ahead of the system disk, which caused the long pause before booting. Changed those around and all is well. Also had to download drivers from the dell website for the Intel chipset, sound card (integrated) and modem. report abuse reply
CDIZZLE: so in theory i could do the whole dual boot thing to put xp on there with vista, then remove vista because it sux, keep the xp, and not lose all the stuff i have on my hard drive? if so, how would i remove vista?
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reply David Provost: why not back up all the DATA (not programs, OS) on your vista machine to CD/DVD/USB drive then reformat your drive and install XP from scratch?
report abuse ptownprinc: Thanks for your great article, I was able to install both, they are up and running, and I am a happy camper again! KUDOS! ptownprince
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reply burritobrother: Argh, help! When I tell it to shrink (using that shift+F10 thingy), it gives me this message: "Virtual Disk Service error: The specified shrink size is less than the minimum shrink size allowed. The arguments you specified for this command are not valid." Cheers in advance.
report abuse thanks: the informatic need people like you... thanks.
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report abuse wutdlandish: after reading this:
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"More importantly, applications which have installation paths hard-coded into their install scripts rather than using Windows system parameter variables could easily dump files into C: when they should be installing to E:. This isnt such a great situation." i notice you don't actually offer any solution to the problem, or explain why you are giving us advice on this dual boot when infact it could mess things up. why? report abuse reply Grum: I followed the above instructions to the pin point until realising that the vista disk i have was actually a recovery disk that came with my Asus lap-top and not the install dvd. Right, as you've probably presumed i carried on probably out of stupidity but i like to think i was just being adventurous!
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As it stands i have installed vista (c:) and XP (e:), the EasyBCD was already installed from when i tried before and it simply didn't work (which when i tried to install again i noticed Vista recovery had actually deleted the XP partition). Well now i want out and would settle with W2K! I have a toaster as far as my knowledge takes me, when i boot up i get the 'Asus' welcome page and it just sits there, if i reboot and press F2 for BIOS i get the system specs and 'entering SETUP...' followed by auto detecting the USB, IDE Hard Disk, ATAPI CDROM then Pri Master details but it just sits there. Anyone any ideas? Please, please, please!
report abuse dbplists: Basic overview on how to get back to square 1: 1. Get a boot cd and use it to re-format your hard drive (there are many freely available, e.g. gparted) 2. Use the recovery dvd to re-install vista. Your system will be perfectly fine. If you want more details, e-mail me at dbplists-at-gmail-dot-com report abuse
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reply granny52: Hi all I had all the above problems, too (Vista on drive C, XP installed second on D:) The solution for me was to reinstall XP (it asked if I wanted to install into same directory as before, I said yes, & it kept all my files & settings) I was then able to boot into XP & run VistabootPRO from within XP & it set up the dual boot perfectly. hth.
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Guy: We followed all the instructions and finally got the duelbooting to work but when ever we go onto XP there is no sound devices available for some reason when they still work perfectly fine on Vista what would we have to do to get the sound to work on XP aswell? report abuse reply V15T4: I had the same issue after installing XP today to dualboot with Vista Ultimate. For me it was simply a matter of having individual driver packages for each OS. In comparison of Vista Ultimate and XP, I have found that in most cases you DO NEED OS specific drivers, depending on the hardware. eg. ATI Drivers are OS Specific, A few sound cards I have tested are also. You can usually download OS Specific Drivers from your OEM's website. Good Luck. report abuse reply
DavidB: I was able to do the dual boot install with XP and Vista. I still use XP as my main work environment and boot into Vista to play and slowly install programs there to see what works and what doesn't. I installed office 2003 OK on Vista (It was already installed on XP). Now, I would like to share the "My Documents" folder of XP so that I can read/write that folder and any documents within it from Vista. How do I do this? I don't want to allow "everyone" access to the "My Documents" folder -- only my userid from my Vista boot and my userid from my XP boot. I am afraid to try to take ownership of "My Documents" from Vista because I'm afraid that I will no longer be able to access the files from XP. Is it possible to set permissions so that both XP and Vista can have r/w access to the same files but yet not open up the directory to everyone? (I know that I could do this with a separate server but that's not the question). Thanks, David report abuse xyz: excellent reply
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Roger: I have upgraded my Notebook from XP Media to Vista Home Premium and have difficulty running some applications. Rather than partition my disc I thought it might be easier to use an external USB HD and then setup the notebook to boot from the external USB first in the bios. Is this a good approach, as I have read there can be issues which I thought this might negate them. Thanks Roger report abuse Tjmax: Not really, See you have an issue trying to boot XP from usb. When XP starts booting, it will load the USB drivers and effectivly disconnect the boot drive from the system. The only way around it is complicated and messy. report abuse reply Slats: I have been attempting to do this in vain. I have the following HDDs: 320 GB ATA drive in NTFS format with Vista. Old hard drive is 40 GB IDE in Fat 32 format with XP. To get around the booting problem can I install the old hard drive as slave to the new hard drive? Or are the two incompatible? report abuse reply slats: Refer to my previous comment #195. Had more tough experience with this: Found out that the SATA and IDE were incompatible so I got an IDE to SATA converter that works just fine with everything but a dual boot! The system recognizes the slave drive and all its files, but it still will not boot into XP! Anyone, anyone have any ideas about this? I have set up dual boot systems in the past but never with this much trouble. I am at the point of suggesting a new motto for microsoft: If it's Microsoft it suks! report abuse reply reply
Mike: I wasted some hours trying to get my Vista to recognize the newly installed XP last night. This morning I found this site and tried what was suggested, ... voil it worked. Thanks guys.
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Marsh: Hi, I bought a new Toshi laptop w/ Vista installed and am trying to make it dual boot. I installed XP Pro OK, but things got screwed up with the ntldr issue (I wish I'd read all the comments). So, I tried reinstalling XP Pro. During the install, instead of an EULA and the option to select a partition, I got a message saying there's already a \WINDOWS folder on the drive. Thinking this was the existing XP folder, I went ahead and used it. I was wrong, it was on the Vista partition and broke Vista. So I reinstalled Vista and deleted the XP partition. Now, whenever I try to install XP, I have the same problem: no EULA, no partition choice, just the option of wiping out Vista's \Windows folder or aborting the install. Can any of you geniuses suggest a way around this? report abuse reply
Marsh: I too had the dreaded ntldr problem and have a few points that may help others. (1) If you follow the tutorial, chances are boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com ARE installed on your system. Make sure your viewing options are set to allow you to see system files and go to C:\. The files were there for me: no need to copy them from the XP installation CD. (2) You really have two options on how to configure the system to access these files properly. In my case, the problem was that the files were in C:\, but the BCD was set to boot off of D:\ (which is where I have XP). You can either (a) copy the files from C:\ to D:\ (i.e., wherever you have XP), OR you can change the BCD to point to where these files are (C:\). Since boot.ini points to the partition where XP resides, STARTING the boot process from somewhere else works fine. The advantage of copying the files is that if one of the partitions becomes corrupted, the other one may still work. The disadvantage is that you have duplicate files taking up space; if one copy changes, you have to locate and fix the others; and it's less elegant. (3) I used VistaBootPro to fix the BCD. It worked fine. Don't worry about its need to have .NET installed. Vista has .NET. Just install VistaBootPro under Vista and run it there. report abuse mark: i have done everything as said and it works but now i wish to give xp more space as it only has 2gb left where as vista has 25gb free space how do i give xp an extra 15gbs of vista's space now that the dual boot has already been made? report abuse John: Hi, I used this guide to add an XP installation next to an existing Vista installation, with the difference that I used a second hard disk for XP. This is what I did: - Add second hard disk as slave and boot Vista. Vista boots (from primary) and recognizes the second hard disk and I can browse the files on it. - Boot with XP cd-rom and install XP on the second hard disk (which it calls D:). The XP installation copies its files and reboots. Then I get a boot error. - Boot with Vista cd-rom and repair the MBR. Vista recognizes the (one) Vista installation, I choose to repair the MBR and it reports that it found an error and fixed it. - Reboot Vista -> boot error! And there I get the standard boot error message at the command prompt. I disconnected the second hard disk (with half-way XP install) and set the DVD player on that cable back to primary. Still the same error. Now I can only boot with the Vista cd-rom. It still finds the (one) Vista install, when I try to repair it it reports there was nothing to repair. But still I can't boot it... Any help is greatly appreciated. Regards, - John report abuse reply reply reply
Chown: I installed xp after vista but i dont have a vista install cd, in gparted i can see the drives, i want to boot to vista to repair the bootloader but i cant even though the vista partition is flagged for boot, the extended partition for xp is flagged lba but it boots into xp and not vista. please help me out =] report abuse reply
Doug Hynes: The following method has been working for me to add an XP boot to an existing Vista. It has the advantages of not needing to repair the Vista boot AND of having the XP system drive installed as C: 1. Create the available space as described in the article 2. Using Disk Manager from Vista, create a new partition in that unallocated space -- don't use the XP install to do that. 3. Still in Disk Manager, set that new partition as Active. WARNING: That means that the machine will now be trying to boot from the empty partition. That's OK because the next thing you're going to do is install XP from a bootable CD. If you restart and then change your mind, you'll have to have some bootable utility to change the active partition again. 4. Boot from the XP installation CD and start the install. When you get to the step where you select the XP partition, you'll notice that your new target partition is C! That's because the active partition is always assigned that letter at this point. So your new partition will show as C and the existing Vista will show up as some other letter. So XP WILL be installed as C. Vista will remain C, too. Finish the install. 5. Once XP is running, copy NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.ini from the XP partition to the Vista partition. This is required because the Vista partition will soon be the boot partition again . 6. Still from XP, use Disk Manager to change the Active partition back to the original Vista partition. The Vista partition's letter will show up as something other than C, doesn't matter, it will be C when booting Vista. Since the XP install never touched the Vista partition, NO repair is needed -- reboot and Vista will startup again. 7. Use EasyBCP as described to add the XP boot. I can vouch from experience that this works very well. In fact you can have any number of Windows OSes all running as C using this method. You can also adjust drive letters using the HKLM/System/MountedDevices registry key. I've used this method to have 5 or 10 OSes installed in different partitions all at one time, and to restore various images to any partition and then fix the drive letters. report abuse OzzY: Works good .. thanks guys reply
report abuse jim: Your variation looks attractive since Vista is untouched. I would like to have the two OS's on physically separate drives. Can your
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method apply to to this case also? If so please detail the differences in procedure.
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reply Doug Hynes: This is trickier but possible. You can still use this basic method, but you have to create, at least temporarily, a small empty partition on drive 0.
Windows has the concept of the "system partition" where the actual OS is, and the "boot partition" where boot sector and loader are located. While the system partition can be on any partition on any drive, the boot partition has to be the active partition on drive 0. Why my method works without modifying Vista is because by changing the active partition, the Vista boot partition isn't mucked with. The article's method requires the repair because XP, not knowing about Vista, wipes the Vista boot information with its own. In either case, the last step is teaching the Vista partition to also act as the XP boot partition. So, just as in the instructions above, create an empty partition on drive 0 and set it to active. The difference is, this partition can be tiny because it's just going to hold the boot files. Then boot from the XP cd and install to any drive and partition you want. Then follow the rest of the instructions, except you'll need to copy the XP files from the boot partition and not from the main XP partition. When you're done and have reset the active partition to the Vista partition, you can delete the other partition on drive 0 -- it's no longer in play. This still has the advantage of not touching Vista BUT your resulting XP will NOT have drive C as the system drive. It is possible to have the XP partition end up as C but it's more work, potentially a lot more. What you do is initially install XP on the active partition, then use Norton, Acronis, or some other imaging utility to copy the partition to where you want it, then modify the MountedDevices registry to tell XP to see the partition as C. I used this method to build lots of test boxes off the same images so the effort was worth it, but may not be worth it to you for one setup. OTH I just find a system drive letter that's not C always eventually causes headaches. report abuse BobN: Hi Doug, Excellent posting! You have now given us the definitive solution. It should solve everyone's NTLDR, HAL.DLL etc problems. I wiped my XP partition and reinstalled XP with your system. XP installed perfectly and dual booted correctly with Vista. The trick is clearly to make each partition active as required. During my previous XP installation, the PC rebooted several times (as normal) but could not find the HAL.DLL file each time. I worked round this, but ended up with the system files installed in a BOOT directory rather than a WINDOWS directory. XP did run, but I was never happy with the installation. My problem is now to find XP drivers for my HP Pavilion DV6200 laptop. The ones I have downloaded from the HP FTP site do not appear to install correctly. If you can offer any help in this direction I should be most grateful. In the meantime,I shall email HP technical support! report abuse Vanya: Where do I find NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.ini in the XP partition? reply reply
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Joe Searfoss: Doug, This is what I was looking for. I want to keep the drive letter for Vista and XP the same (C). One question before I dive into it. Do you have to go in and change the active partition each time you want to switch between Vista and XP to keep the drive letter to C, or does installing it this way and then using the Vista boot manager still keep the drives the same ? Thanks report abuse reply
Sipa: I setted the new patition as Active and boot it from XP CD but I only see C: drive with full disk space. I dont see an other drive which should be Vista per your doc. Please help! Thanks!
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David P: Others believe your system works well. I wanted to dbl-chk a couple things before i try it. My system: HP dv6500t CTO new laptop with Vista Ultimate 64-bit and SATA drives. No system disk; it's OEM only with a recovery disk. What I want: a dual-boot with Xp Pro SP2 as the other OS. Questions: 1) No floppy. How get SATA drives in there so XP will recognize it and boot off it? Where find and how to get into machine? 2) Will the recovery disk work (don't have system disk for Vista)? 3) Is Vista/64 a problem if I want to put on XP/32-bit? Thank you so much in advance for taking the time to share your thoughts! report abuse reply Razher: I have same problem and i don't have any drivers! I know that you can use nlite program to integrate sata drivers to winXP installation. Can you send me those drivers? If you need, i can send you nlite Thanks report abuse reply
Arthas: So, how can you dual-boot Vista / XP, with Vista being pre-installed and I don't have the Vista DVD. 'Cause as I follow the HOW TO, it mentions to repair the MBR using Vista DVD.
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reply Sonny: This is a much needed issue that needs attention. Perhaps the generous author of these articles could create one for just this situation? Hard to derive meaningful steps to follow from all of the various posts found herein.
My experience thus far has been painful in trying to follow these steps with pre-installed Vista. I used Gnome to resize partition. Then tried to load up XP. But, continue to get hit with .psi problem and corrupted boot files.
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I can load Linux but computer won't even load Vista any longer, XPPro can't load either. Any assistance for those of us with these pre-installed systems without disks would be greatly appreciated. THANKS! Sonny report abuse reply
sjd: Before I started all this I created VISTA recovery disks. If you boot up using the recovery disk you will get the same screen as is shown in the turorial. ie - repair your computer, etc.
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Esoteric: This guide look real good and I will certainly be using it to install XP OS but I have a little question: I have Vista that was pre installed and I will install XP as a second OS but I also wish to install Linux so my question is witch guide do I follow after installing XP to then install Linux?? Or is it a case of any will do?? Thanx in advance for help. report abuse bw_william: Can anyone please tell me, after I installed dual boot system. Do I need to reinstall the driver? I have got other softwares installed on Vista, am I able to use them under XP or I need to reinstall them? Thanks. report abuse Rj: Does anyone know how i can get this to work for a ACER aspire 5610 laptop? reply reply
report abuse Trigio: Hi, My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive to install the sata driver when i boot from the XP CD. Yesterday i got me an external USB drive, formatted a floppy, put on the RAID SATA drivers, boot from the XP CD, F6, Loaded the drivers, Setup sees the unformatted partition and formats it, windows tries to install on that partition and asks again for the RAID drivers on A: So i press 'enter' but nothing happens??? It just stays there and does not look at the floppy or the install CD. The only option left is F3 = quit install. Anyone got some ideas? TNX, T. report abuse
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reply Bane: Alright, I decided I wanted a dual boot. My laptop came w/ Vista Premium install on the C: drive and a second partition that I named as my B: drive. I wanted to splitt B: into another partition lets say K: and i wanted to make K: my XP pro partition. Well... I didnt think anything of messing anything up..so I just pop in my XP disk and went to my B: partition and reformat it and make it into two more partitions. Well when I started I choose the wrong option and choose to Install keeping files. So installing XP on my full B: partition instead of making an K partition.
I couldnt get out so I just held the power button down to restart the Computer when it restarted and w/ the disk out I keep getting a Error loading operating system. So at this very moment I have put the XP disc back in and Formating the B: partition. As soon as that has finished should I put in my Vista disc and try to recover or should I go ahead and make a K: and install XP, and then do the the Vista repair. Or is my Vista completely trashed and I have to make a complete new install.
Please let me know if you have any answers or suggestions. Thanks before hand. report abuse reply Bane: Well it doesnt seem like I hurt my computer there....after that I got Vista to run again with the repair. Then I went and made two partitions and went to install XP. After the formatting and everything and when it went to restart into the GUI it said Error loading operating system...so i tried do the Vista repair and so that way I could do the EasyBCD...but Vista would never repair and I couldn't get booted back on to do that. So now I am kinda stuck as it wont repair and it wont boot in either operating system. Please help. report abuse reply
Bane: Ok I got my system back to somewhat normal. Since I couldnt run any restore points or system what I did was Install a clean version of Vista on the second partition. After it finished and rebooted I restarted and I had the option of booting a different Vista (my orginal) and it work..no error...so I went and deleted and formated the new Vista partition and I can now use my original. I dont know if I am going to try and do a dual boot again any time soon but there was also an option of on the start up, to start w/ an earlier version of Windows..if anyone knows how I can get rid of this option please let me know...I sorry for all the posts that I ended up fixing myself...I just didnt want to have to sit here for a day or two without my main computer, so I just fooled around with it a bit. Also it seems my highspeed USB ports are no longer highspeed? I plugged in my external hdd and it said this device can perform at a higher speed blah blah blah...and I left one of my external hdd plugged in during all this and i think it got messed up because it isnt opening on my Vista computer and on my xp computer it says that it is currupted. But it is still being recognized on both systems. Anyone know what I should do about the 3 things. report abuse Cowboy: I have the same problem....I get Error Loading Operating System and I cant get into vista.....any idea's please. reply
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Alex M: Thanks for the article. I will be reformatting my computer in the next few weeks and this is exactly what I was looking for. I already have Vista installed on a separate drive, so I imagine the steps to format my XP drive and reinstall it are much the same as described here.
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Todd F: Thanks for the great post. I ran into one other problem that I had to fix and I'm not sure if anyone posted yet (although there are about 150 replies). After shrinking my first partition the windows xp installer would not find the free space I created. The reason was that my hard drive is about 250gigabytes and Windows XP Pro as released without any service packs will only recognize 150 gigs of space before it stops. So the installer would only look so far into my hard drive before deciding there was only one partition. I was forced to slipstream windowsXP service Pack 2 into an install disk. See this great article for how to do that: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp Also while doing that I couldn't find a version of nero6 that would work properly (the demo for 7 kept failing, and don't try Nero in vista!) so I found an online download here with the cd key at the bottom of this page under Radderz post: http://www.soft32.com/download_263.html Thanks again! report abuse reply
Jack: I have a new HP desktop with Vista Home Premium pre-installed, and am trying to install XP in a dual-booting configuration. I don't have a Vista install disk, so I'm using Gparted to shrink the existing drive and create a new partition. I've download Gparted 3.4-7 to a CD, but the computer won't boot to it. What am I doing wrong? report abuse reply Soapy: I think I have the same laptop as mentioned in post #48- an HP Pavilion with Vista Home Premium preloaded. No disk, but an HP recovery disk. HD is a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 ATA 160GB. I have the partition, but when booting from an XP CD I get the "Cannot find any hard drives " error. In post 49, it is suggested that SATA support be turned off in the BIOS- but there is no ability to do this in the Phoenix BIOS. Shutting off DMA support does not help. Any ideas? report abuse CheeseREX: 2 questions Do I back up my files as a precaution, or am I doing it because they will be reformatted? and How would I go about the Vista repair process if Vista came pre-installed(I have no Vista dvd to boot to the repair startup)? report abuse Tom: I was sent this article. http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html Anyone experiencing this with Vista dual boot? report abuse reply reply reply
evilkidbuu: Hello. I haven't done this dual boot yet, because i am unsure if it works or not and i have some questions. I have the Windows Xp Boot disc with a serial number. However that serial number is used for my laptop. Do i need a new serial or not, or i don't need a serial at all? After all these instructions, do windows vista make a backup on the hard disk? Is this really works without any problems?
Please answer me by emailing me at: evilkidbuu@hotmail.com report abuse woodlander: ok, so i see that my previous comment was either deleted or not added at all. hmmm... anway, it questioned the fact that, under the situation you advocate, xp is installed to drive D instead of drive C. you yourself point out the possible problems involved in this and i won't go into it futher. but, i have just installed windows 2000. i used the 2000 boot disk to create 2 partitions when i was installing it. i installed 2000 to the primary partition. then i installed vista to the second one. vista has automatically dual booted me with 2000. it gives me the option from the vista boot screen of "previous version of windows" or vista. this is obviously from a clean install, your guide aims for an existing installation with a disk shink. but, what this has done for me is that vista and 2000 both think they are installed on the drive called C. ie, when you boot up with 2000, drive C has the 2000 installation on it. but when you boot vista, it does exactly the same. and this is not either installation using eachothers partition either. i know this because of verifying the size of the drive. whenever you boot up vista, the D drive switches its name to drive C. how cool is that? this is very smart behaviour for both operating systems. and one i would advocated if you were wanting a dual boot. report abuse reply reply
kiko: hi guys. i am dentist that actually really stupid in computing.looolz.i installed vista after xp and everything was going so fine and i got dual booting between both with no any problems.meanwhile after some time i inserted xp cd to do some repairs in the system.after finishing this step i did restart and suddenly the dual boot page didnt appear on startup and everytime directs me immediately to xp and no vista anymore.plz guys if anyone have anyidea about me mess.plz reply.thnx alot report abuse reply
newdell: Hi everyone I bought a dual core from dell with vista already on it. I tried to install xp. It would crash after booting from the "xp install cd" and would only let me reboot. It would state that there was a problem and windows was shutting down to prevent problems and I should run check disk and virus scan to see if the drive is still ok. I tried several things from reading posts. I tried to format everything using the vista cd and then putting the xp cd in. It would load but right before the "agree to terms" part it would shut down and show a blue screen. I also tried to install vista first and then partition the hard drive using the shrink tool in vista and then I booted with the xp cd and it still did the same thing and gave me the blue screen letting me know that it was going to stop and I should check my hard drive. PLEASE HELP. I tried everything I could from forums and I still cannot load xp on. I would actually rather just have xp than have a dual boot but will take a dual boot if it is the only way to have xp. Thank you in advance! report abuse Appleman: I am having the same problem as you on a new quad core dell dimension 9200. I am looking for some help on this reply
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woodlander: hey kiko, the xp boot cd has viewed the vista bootloader as something to be 'repaired' and got rid of it, then replaced it with it's own. since xp bootloader cannot recognize vista, you wouldn't be able to dual boot. i think you just need to use this bdsm piece of software these guys write about in the article report abuse reply kiko: dear wood lander.thanx alot man for ur care conserning my mess.but fortunately i dunno the software that u r talking about plz if u can tell me about it or type its link again so as to help me as i am really disappointed from what happened by the xp cd.thnx report abuse janderman: OK - So I have both a partition with XP (15G ) and one with Vista (182G) on my machine. I can boot into Vista using the Vista boot loader. I added the XP boot to the EasyBCD boot list and it appears on the Master Boot Loader screen with the Vista boot option. When I select the XP boot option, I get a 'NTDLR not found' error. If I remove the MBD I can boot the XP installation but then to get back to Vista, I have to repair the boot loader from the Vista DVD. Also - when I look at the deatails on the Easy BCD details page - it seems that it is trying to boot the XP install from F: even though I selected C: in the XP boot set-up! Any assistance or ideas would be greatly appreciated!!! reply
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reply cntrading: I have the same problem as Janderman. I have tried resinstalled both vista and xp(mce) again. And same failure accur (cannot find \ntldr). I have tried with both XP and Vista installed first but no change. I have used Acronis for making new partitions in Vista before I installed XP the first time. Using Easybcd i also see that the drive letter change (to C: from E:) when I want to add XP to the list.
I also need ideas.
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cntrading: Used the vista installation disk to format the drive where I previus had the XP installed. Also used Vista to "shink" the partion. Then follow the guide, and this time it worked. Maybe Vista need to make the partion it selves to make it work. When using Easybcd it shows that C: is used for both Vista and XP.???? Dont no why but it still works
report abuse You Can Partition Using Vista's Built In Programs...: just to let every1 know, vista has its own partitioning program built in... google it
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johnnylinux: 1.vista partition must be set active (use gparted acronis boot cd partition magic or fdisk etc) otherwise it won't continue the installation during the first reboot. ALSO make sure you format the partition with vista. If you use a partition tool to create a partition label vista won't install when it reboots. (if you are concerned about xp dumping files in your vista partition you can use acronis boot cd or what ever to hide your vista partition until you have installed xp/programs) 2.It does not matter whether you install vista first or or xp as far as i can see. When i installed xp 1st and vista ultimate (cd not dvd) 2nd, xp did not show up in the vista boot loader. I tried installing vista 1st and xp 2nd i ended up with the same situation. 3.The answer was so simple. First thing is to install EasyBCD 1.6. In the 'Add/Remove Entries ' Advanced options' add an xp entry. You will probably find like i did that your xp entry will point to the c: drive even though your XP partition is not 'c:' (note your 'active' partition c: is now windows vista) You don't need to change the default setting but if your xp entry is not pointing to the c: drive you can change it manually under the 'Entry-based settings' in the 'Configure Boot tab). The second thing to do is simply copy the files 'NTLDR' and 'NTDETECT' from your xp CD (located in the i386 folder) to the c: drive of your windows vista partition. Your vista partition should now have the following: c: NTLDR c: NTDETECT reboot and enjoy So much time wasted on this when i could have been installing the new versions of fedora, ubuntu and xandros which just arrived in the mail this week. With your favorite linux distrubutions you simply install each 'grub bootloader' in your boot partition for that distribution. You can do this during your Linux installation by choosing the 'advanced boot loader settings'. By using 'EasyBCD' you can use the 'vista bootloader' to point towards your Linux boot partitions. The way i set up Linux was adding an entry the xp boot.ini file with 'bootpart'. It is so easy and hassle free to reinstall windows since i never had to touch my linux installations when windows needs reinstalling (note install your linux boot partitions after your c: drive) . Cheers everybody johnnylinux
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An update on booting fedora 7 with EasyBCD 1.6. The first time i went to the 'Add/Remove' tabb, Linux/BSD tabb, the 'Drive' partition number showed my boot partition as being number 3. I added the entry and tried to boot Fedora but with no luck. I read the great documentation on the 'NeroSmart' website and discovered the awesome 'SuperGrubDisc '. I burned the image and within a few minutes i was able to locate grub and boot fedora 7 for the first time after installation. I rebooted Vista and tried EasyBSD again and this time the drive (partition) listing was in a different order. The /boot partition was now number 1. I added the entry and rebooted and it worked like a dream. Great program and excellent documentation.
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Mike: Ok, im in a bit of a mess here considering i can't get further unlike the majority here. From my pre-installed Vista, i went to My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management and was able to Shrink my main and primary drive in which Vista Ultimate is installed on (400 GB Sata Drive). I was then able to set about 100 GB of unallocated space over that will be used for the XP partition. When i insert my XP setup disk, and boot i receive the error that it doesn't detect any hard drive or partition. Anyone have any
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suggestions on what i should do because im lost even though reading thru all the comments. ~Please and thank you report abuse Hamid: I'm having the same problem. As nobody has answred here yet, did you find a solution from anywhere else? reply
report abuse hackman: I have seen this error with some sata controllers. It can be bypassed by going into the bios and choosing the compatibility mode for the sata controller.
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MaxRabbit: So if I have Vista on drive C, and install XP on G, when I install something system-related on XP, how will it install to G:\windows instead of C:\windows? That is something that bugs me, and I am unsure about. report abuse reply Chasl77: I partitioned my hard disk using Disk Management, Vista OS on C: drive, XP on E: drive and Data on D: drive. I tried numerous time to reboot with XP setup disk but each time it just reboot into Vista not detecting XP setup disk at all...pls help.
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reply antonio: ok after reading all the problems you guys had i dont even recon is a good idea to et into all this but i need to dual boot my laptop with xp and vista i followed the tutorial in here which went fine till i was meant to install xp, the program compatibility assitant in vista does not let me install it and i dont know if i am just missing something really obious. can anyone help? thanks
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reply bronxbadhan: If your still wondering where you went wrong, I had the same problem. You don't install after you log in to Vista, you install from BIOS setup. When your PC starts up, find the BIOS menu, like F2, and change your boot order to cd/dvd drive first.
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Anonymous95B10: Can't thank you enough for this post -- you saved my sanity. Works perfecty if you follow the directions. Save yourself some time and download BSD on your Vista partition before you start.
report abuse zeerocks: I bought a desk top with Vista installed. If I add a second HDD from an old PC that has XP installed, can I use easyBCD to set up for dual booting? OR do I need to install XP from a CD so that Vista knows about it? Cheers Phil report abuse Jack Bauer: Similar query to Phil 222. I just installed Vista on a new 250GB HDD, while keeping XP Pro and all my apps on the old HDD.
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Keeping the case open if I want to switch back to XP because certain apps are not Vista compatible (according to Vista on install, like Nero 7 Premier), all I do is switch data and power cables from one to the other HDD. Presumably if I had both plugged into the m/b simultaneously, I could simply go into Bios on boot and switch the boot priority order to either HDD to get me the option of which OS to run at any one time. I don't want to get both OS on the new HDD. Any advice appreciated. report abuse reply Ajax: I just loaded XP pro on a seperate hardrive to Vista on my brand new HP pavilion dv9000 series laptop. I followed the instructions on this link and it works perfectly. easyBCD works a treat and the only other thing I had to do that is not mentioned by the authors of this article is to install drivers for sound, graphics and USB support for XP. When I boot I get a choice of either vista or XP and both boot up no problems at all. I am not an expert by any means but have built about 20 systems for friends so far and as a novice having a few thoughts I think most of the problems have occured with installing two OS on one hard drive. I know it is simple procedure to partition and have done it many times using programs like partition magic, but I cant help but notice everyone having problems when arranging dual OS's on one partitioned drive. Anyway, thats just food for thought! report abuse Igor: Dear Ajax, Tel me were you found " audio driver" for Pavilion 9000 ? I have the same laptop....and no audio driver for XP-Pro ....? Please Help ! reply
report abuse marty : I was thinking the same thing I have hp tx 1000 with vista a ext.60 gig western digital harddrive so are you saying you loaded xp on a ext.harddrive and got to work
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Daz: Hi, the article was excellent. I want to remove XP from my computer. But Xp is on the C:/ drive and Vista is on H:/ drive, can anyone give me some tips of how I can Kill XP without have a lot of issues? I read the articles for both xp and vista dual booting and removing the other o/s. I noticed it makes no mention of how to remove the old O/S just the newly installed O/S. Thanks and cheers keep up the good work!
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reply mic: I got a fujitsu laptop running vista and osx how i did it? use the pre-patched uphuck image (osx patched)run the installer on a system using intel chips and voila!
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JJBTNC: been thinking about the drive letter assignment problem with XP - while not the end of the world i have come across programs that wanted to install to a c: and not what xp says is it's system drive - and it does seem kind of irritating and messy to have xp not assign it's system drive as c: so.... ....i was thinking, could you... I have Partition Magic 8, and i was wondering if it would be possible to follow the instructions up to the point before you install XP, run PM8 and get it to hide the partition that Vista is currently on. Then run the XP install - in this case will XP not see the Vista partition and therefore not assign it the c: drive letter? Boot in to XP and would it then show it's system partition as C: Once XP has been installed as per the guide, you would normally go to the "Restoring Vista and dual booting" section of the guide which is basically running the Vista DVD and using the repair options to fix the booting issue. Before you do this you could then run PM8 again and unhide the Vista partition, and then run the Vista DVD Following the above you should in theory end up with a dual boot, Vista will have it's system drive as C: but when you boot XP (presuming the previous experiment ended up with xp thinking it's system drive was c: ) will it still think it's system drive is C: ? Even if (and that's a pretty big if in my eyes) it did work would it cause any problems? If you did an install with xp first and then Vista they would both claim that there system drives are both C: so can't really see why it would cause problems.
report abuse steve.dan: Hi
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My computer has 120gig of space when I got to the stage when typing shrink it it left me with a total of 55gig left and vista taking 44gig left of space. Please help Regards, Rob report abuse Joe: wanted to share some observations. 1. You do not need a Vista DVD to do this process 2. Read post 183 and then next ones after that (do the partioning this way) 3. Read post 23 - 30 if you run into the ntdlr problem 4. In my case I needed a floppy drive becasue I had to load the SATA controller. Note that XP SP2 caused a stop error. When I loaded the drivers from dell (using F6) worked fine. 5. I have Dell XPS 410. Comes with 3 primary partitons (main OS, recovery and a EISA part). I deleted the recovery, shrank the main OS and created a XP drive. Not sure if it me or Vista but could not make more than 3 primary drives. 6. You will need to install all drivers for XP. 7. The dell XPS comes with all XP drivers 8. If you use Gparted to do the work it will take a long time. To move a partiton took 8+ hours. Although it did work like a charm. Good luck reply
report abuse jjbtnc: Just wanted to check with you Joe about the Dell recovery options you get at boot.
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I'm not sure it's clear to users that installing OS's might mess with their pcs built in recovery process - just wanted to try and clear some things up. On a friends Dell he bought recently there is a recovery option when you boot -F11 i think - that allows you to reload a factory image. When you go through the process of installing xp do you lose this functionality? I realise in your case you deleted the recovery partition where this image is located so obviously you not bothered by it - but i just wondered if you have noticed if the Dell recovery system via a keypress at boot was still available? My thinking is that it would be gone as the MBR would have been changed during the install of XP and it would be a custom Dell MBR that gives this recovery functionality? If it is lost do you know if it can be restored? Maybe by backing up the MBR (not sure what program you would use)before the install of xp and then restoring the Dell MBR afterwards? This might then allow you to boot to xp or vista but KEEP the recovery boot option? report abuse reply Joe: No option. You can get the recovery partition from Dell. However I just made an image of the recovery partiton and put it on a old hard drive. Hopefully I won't need XP to long. report abuse reply
Jon: Ok. So I did everything as planned, and it worked PERFECTLY except... I couldn't get online... It successfully connected to my wireless hub, but couldnt get an IP address.. also, before I uploaded XP, Vista ran pretty well.. but after I loaded XP, everything slowed down so much... and XP has an extremely slow start up... what should I do? report abuse reply
fourdogs: I wiped out my XP/OS and installed Vista Ultimate. I then decided to dual boot with XP Pro so I proceeded to shrink the drive and set aside 10G for XP Pro. I a Dell XPS210 with a SATA hard drive by the way. I inserted my XP Pro CD and rebooted to the cd. I then chose the unallocated space for the XP install and formatted with NTFS. After the formatting completed the system rebooted. At reboot the bios version screen came up and the system came to a halt. I could not access setup or the ability to choose the boot method. I then disconnected the hard drive and was able to boot to a CD. SATA drives are hot swappable so I reconnected the hard drive as the system was booting from the CD but I still cannot see the hard drive. If the hard drive is attached the system will stop at the screen that stated the bios and go no further. The only way to get to bios is if I disconnect the hard drive. I have the system set to recognize the SATA and boot from the CD first but the problem continues. I havent seen this problem with any other systems on this board and I hope someone can shed some light on this problem. Thanks
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reply norman: Small tips to everyone, im now having a dual boot on my pc and its easy to use. first, install windows xp, make two partitions, 1 for xp and 1 for vista. after installing windows xp, proceed on the installation of windows vista. after intallation of vista you can now boot with the "earlier version of windows", w/c is xp and windows vista w/c is your first boot priority. then download the BCD, (its very useful to me), then try to modify your booting options, been using this since windows vista launches and i've tried this for so many times. PEACE.
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Lomax: After carefully following these instructions, I never fail to get an error message that says XP cannot be installed because of the newer OS. No one else seems to have this problem here. Its the i386\winnt32.exe thats causing the problem. report abuse reply
tony: When i get to the part where you install xp the blue screen appears but there is only one partition and that is c: where my Vista is stored so i f3 out so as not to install 2 OS on same drive how do i get the new partition to show its self when i reeboot vista it can see both partitions c: and the new x: help help
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reply Ste1200: I get to the point of going to install Windows XP, and it says it can't find a hard drive to install on to, and the only option is Exit. Also, I can't seem to know find the unallocated space that was created, any ideas please ?
report abuse Tim: Eep. Thanks for a great tutorial, but despite its thorough step-by-step instructions, I think I've messed it up!
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As it stands, no OS will boot for me, instead, I'm constantly being lumbered with "Error Loading Operating System". The DISKPAT process was executed successfully and I had attempted to install XP on the 2nd partition, which had just under 50gb available. I have since tried the diagnostics on the Vista boot disc, to no avail. I've also started completely from scratch with the XP installation, but still the same thing. I'm pretty much computer-less at this point... so any suggestions? Thanks in advance. report abuse Slim: What I found I had done was mistakenly made active the :D drive which did not have a boot manager active. The manufacturer i.e. E-machines in my case directed me to the "Data Life Guard 11" tools for E-machines. (Google it) I did not find it helpful since I did not have a floppy on my comp. However I figured out a fix with out the E-Machine solution. Insert the "Operating System" disk that comes with the computer. This is different then the "System Recovery Disk" that has to be ordered from the manufacturer. (Which I have done and received at this point) I suggest you do the same. but you will not need it to fix the missing Boot Manager Problem. Insert Operating System disk. Restart computer and hit F11 and space bar back and fourth until a prompt screen comes up. Click the advanced options. Fist click repair. This will not fix the problem . "But I have found it has to be done for some reason." Then restart. Do the F11 and space bar again. This time select advanced options and then the "Ignore signatures option" It will say are you sure. Click yes. Then Restart. Boot the operating system disk again. This time just click install operating system. It will now show you both partitions. The one you have active with no boot drive and your old set-up. Click on the new one. Click the format button. Click yes. Then click the delete button and click yes. Then click install to the drive you just deleted. When it is done your computer will start as normal. But you will notice it is a whole new VISTA. DO NOT PANIC. YOUR INFO IS SAFE! Just go to start Then control panel, then System and Maintenance, then scroll to bottom and select "Create and format hard disk partitions. Once there you will see your old set up under another drive letter and this new one is "C" Right Click your old set up and click make as active. Restart. Your comp will be back to where you started. If you go to the Format Hard disk Partitions again. you can now format and delete the new set up you had just made to get you computer back up and running. Just be sure to NOT choose make active again. You will now notice your old set up is back as :C drive. Hope that helps anyone who made the very simple minded mistake I did. As it can be quit frustrating having a none working computer. reply
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reply mavbsbll21: I tried this and it seemed that windows xp service pack 2 would not install because it said it could not find any older versions to update. But i've decided to scrap this idea and just want all the hard drive space i took away when i partitioned.(which by the way i could never see any unallocated space,even after i refreshed and restarted) back into vista. i shrunk my 320gb hard drive down to 212gb hard drive. i just want it to be at 320gb again. Anyone know how i would do that?
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Jack: One extremely useful, powerful , & free disk partition manager is GParted, yet it needs to run under a Linux bootable CD. Some wonderful folks have done this & made Parted Magic which can be downloaded at:http://partedmagic.com/downloads.htmlGParted will give you the ability to resize an NTFS partition & change the boot flag if required, simply an amazing tool!I also recommend using the free & outstanding JkDefrag program to defagment & compact the files & optimise the free space on the partition to be resized prior to using GParted. This will ensure the most effective resizing possible & lessen the chance of cutting off some necessary files that might be lurking around at the back end of the partition! It can be downloaded at:http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/Cheers, Jack report abuse PiwiKiwi: Thank the gods for your posting Slim! I noticed some minor differences when using the method you described, but it was mostly as you described. Thanks, I was seriously pissed off when everything stopped working. report abuse reply reply
nishanth: how come its giving me an error when i tryed to install xp. something like this s the first time you seen this check ur hard drive and stuff.. please help me please....
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Prophesize: hi nishanth, I ran into a similar problem, it turns out that XP sometimes has issues with the SATA controler. To fix this u need to find the drivers and put them on a floppy and use them during the F6 phase of the install. If your on a Laptop like me, and didnt have a floppy, you can make a new xp disk using nLite. Run this program and you can create a new Xp CD with the driver already on it and have avoid the floppy/F6 situation all together. BTW, if its an Intel SATA Controler(like mine), u should use the Intel(R) Matix Storage Manager driver. Hope this helps, Prophesize report abuse reply Jules: I am trying to do a dual Vista/XP boot (Vista was already on the PC). XP is not finding any drives and like you I do not have a floppy drive to install the XP SATA drivers via the F6 option. I had intended to make an .iso image of the XP CD and add the SATA drivers but I don't know where on the .iso image I add the SATA drivers so it automatically finds them and it looks like you do. Can you direct me? Thanks! report abuse Terrible: Thanks this was a great help... Almost nothing that i wanted work on was compatible with vista.. XP has functionality.. reply
report abuse tintin: Hi, i managed to install both OS. but my vista takes forever to shut down. Anybody can help?
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report abuse tintin: Hi, i managed to install both OS. but my vista takes forever to shut down. Anybody can help?
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report abuse Soi: It worked fine for me, i have both OSs installed, except now xp has no drivers or anything and i cant get online with it. :S
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unholydoragon: I get the windows has been shut down problem. I use an HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop with the xb3000 docking station and 300 gb external hard drive. There were no bios given to me to begin with but it works perfectly with vista... How exactly do I do the F6 thing? Thanks report abuse reply
FUBAR-BDHR: Well after beating me head against the wall all day I finally think I have this figured out. First problem was XP wouldn't recognize all of my 250gig hard drive. After creating a SP2 disk I was able to get the copy part of the install to work but received the ntldr error. Did the fix with EasyBCD but every time I tried to boot to the XP partition the PC just rebooted. Finally after 3 hours of fun I tried something stupid. The PC I am working on has a restore partition that XP recognized as C: and installed to D: even though it was actually on J:. Tried C: and J: several times and finally just for the heck of it I tossed D: in there and copied the ntldr, ntdetect, and boot.ini to the recovery partition. Low and behold XP installation picks back up. So it looks like even though the ntldr was copied to the Vista partition C: XP was looking for it on D:. report abuse reply hirbow: My xp partition won't connect to the net vs my Vista is fine- hence i'm writing this post. i've tried everything I could think of,don't know what else to do, any tips? Thank you report abuse Anonymous5584568455315: Have you installed your internet drivers that you get when you sign up for dsl,cable,etc. If you have then make sure in the internet options nothing is turned off and is on the defult settings reply
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report abuse Vijayaragavan: Hi, I've also faced the same problem. This is because of the driver difference. You can download the drivers from the INTEL site (by logging in to vista) and store it ina common location. Instal the same after login in to XP. This should work. Regards, Vijay S report abuse
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mrhappy9: You may find issues with newer computers with componets that are set up for Vista Only! I worked on an HP laptop and lost my network adapter and video and sound!!! HP had nothing to offer. I have yet to rectify this problem. So beware and do your due dilligence as to what drivers are out there for XP on your machine. report abuse reply
Wes: I tried this and it seemed that windows xp service pack 2 would not install because it said it could not find any older versions to update. But i've decided to scrap this idea and just want all the hard drive space i took away when i partitioned.(which by the way i could never see any unallocated space,even after i refreshed and restarted) back into vista. i shrunk my 320gb hard drive down to 212gb hard drive. i just want it to be at 320gb again. Anyone know how i would do that? report abuse reply
leon rothberg: sorry if thes question has already been answered, but i have vista ultimate but my video card is too slow, so in the mean time before i get a new one, can i dual boot xp64 when i am currently using vista32???? also is possible to quadboot xp32, xp64, vista 32 and vista 64?? thanx report abuse Sandeep: I followed the same procedure mentioned above. There was a shrinkable space of 59GB/120GB. When I gave a shrink command in cmd prompt, gave me an error msg "There is not enough space available on the disk(s)". Please help! I badly need to install Win 2003 into my system which has Win Vista Home Premium installed. Thanks in advance. Best Regards Sandeep reply
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Kevin - St. Louis: Can someone help me out here. I've read through the posts and have yet to find a situation like mine. My old computer Pentium got fried but the hard drive was not damaged. I bought an external shell and can access all the information on it. My DREAM is to be able to boot directly from that drive since it has XP Pro already installed on it with all my other files. If this is not possible, I can transfer the personal files and install a fresh version of XP pro. I have the disk. I am operating a Gateway with the AMD dual athlon. (I know, I know...) Can anybody help? report abuse ceberus: im having the same problem as kevin - need help asap! reply
report abuse Antaries: Look in your BIOS to see if you can boot from usb. If so then your problem should be solved.
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ela: hi, i bought a vaio with vista preinstalled. just noticed that my hd is actually split already, with the 1st partition being "recovery". do i still need this? is that the windows installation or just a copy of vista?? also your guide splits the hd 50/50. i want to add another partition for all my files. can i set the size of the vista partition myself? how much space does it need? thanks! report abuse Taufik: Hello everyone, i bought that computer with Vista pre installed, i want to dual boot with XP, but, after i put the windows XP disk, it wont boot up after reset, and when i try do it while im in vista, i can click on Install windows XP, its grey, i really need help, thanks Taufik report abuse Morili: Boot from the Vista DVD and on the screen where youre prompted to Install now, select Repair your computer. Repair Vista reply reply
The next screen searches for local Vista installations there should only be one, so click Next. Choose Vista
This loads the System Recovery Options screen. Select the first option Startup Repair. This looks for problems which would prevent Vista from loading (like a missing bootloader) and automatically fixes them. Startup Repair
If you click on Click here for diagnostic and repair details and scroll to the bottom of the list, it shows that the problem detected and repaired was a corrupt boot sector (according to Vista, anyway). Repair Diagnostics
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Click Close and then Finish, and the system will restart and boot into Vista.
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Taufik: HEllo, since no1 answerd my last comment, i tried do it again, but now, when i did it, about HALF of my HD just disappear, befor i did it, i have about 110GB free on HD, now, i have only 10Gb, where all those 100GB went, i mean its not in use, coz max storge was 190, now max is 90. i might did something worng, there is anything i can change it back? please help!
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Jared: Hey, I'm an aspiring amateur computer expert and was getting annoyed with some stuff with Vista, and I think you guys have given me a possible future with XP. I've got a newly acquired HP dv2000t with Vista Home Premium installed. I'm quite sick of Vista being a massive load on my little machine, and am considering doing this dual-boot operation. However, one of the things I want to know about before I do this is HP's Quickplay feature. It is currently inoperable under Vista as originally designed. It is supposed to play DVD, CD's, Music, etc., without booting an OS. Under Vista, it currently is forced to do just that. I have yet to find a fix for it. So, I'm tacking it up to my excuses to dual-boot XP and Vista. I currently have 2 partitions, C: (Vista) and D: (HP Recovery). Does anyone have any idea what affect this will have on HP's Quickplay? But here is another option I've floated with myself. I have with my HP what appears to be a Windows Vista DVD (its labelled Windows Vista Upgrade Anytime, but appears to function as the install DVD, only requiring the purchase of a liscense key for a Vista upgrade). If I wipe Vista off, install XP (all my stuff saved on an external of course), does anyone know what kind of partition I need to create to be able to use Quickplay? I've found where to download it from HP, I just want to make it work properly. report abuse maz: i dont have the vista dvd. how can i repair the vista bootloader. is it possible to use a third party boot loader such as grub? reply
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Clay: Hi, I am trying to dual boot XP on my Vista machine, but it won't boot from my XP setup CD. Is anyone else having this ridiculous problem? Please e-mail me.
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reply Anon: Is your BIOS set to boot from CD/DVD at startup. If you get pas that hurdle then check your HDD, and if it is SATA type (New computer with VISTA then most probably has), XP will not install. You need to install the SATA drivers for the HDD. Do a google for installing XP on SATA drives. Lots of pages which provide a blow by blow account Good Luck
report abuse Cynthia: Just to be sure.. At the beginning of the tutorial you say "This tutorial assumes that Vista has been installed on a partition which takes up 100% of the hard drive". I have 2 partitions C and D with Vista installed on C. So the process is exactly the same right?. I prefer to ask now that i'm about to begin that when i have made some mistake. report abuse
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JohnHace: This is so cool. I just found it on the EasyBCD forum. When I first installed XP, it showed up on the D: drive. I must have it as a C: drive. Here's the solution. Create the partition with something like GParted and set the new partition as active or boot partition. Then install XP. When you boot XP, it will be on C: and Vista stuff will be on D:. When you boot Vista, it will be C: and XP stuff will be on D:. report abuse michael: I thought it would never work, but it did. Thank you sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much reply
report abuse Justin: ok, i just need help on a tiny issue.... i followed the guide and ran into an issue... easybcd won't let me pick an non existent E drive... do i just make a small partion and letter it e? report abuse
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Andy: I tried your guide to the letter but when xp scans the hard disk to find a partition to install onto it couldnt find any hard disks ! madness ! i have three hard disks on my hp pavillion laptop! everything else worked fine up till that point. Thanks for any help report abuse reply
ToxicShadow: Here's the thing, I dont have a Vista DVD so I can't do the "Repair" option, I read the commments and on number 23 its says "You can do it from XP. Install SP2, .NET Framework 2.0, then EasyBCD. Run BCD, click Manage Bootloader. Select Reinstall the Vista Bootloader, then click write. Reboot and it should boot into Vista. From there you can install and run BCD. Click ADD/Remove Entries, and add an entry for XP and save it. That should be it." This was good until I read in the guide that "IMPORTANT NOTE after the initial file copy, Windows XP reboots and loads up the GUI-based component of the install. You may get the following error: A disk read error occurred press Ctrl-Alt-Del to continue. This is caused by a corrupt bootloader click here to
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see how to fix this problem." The link brings me down to the "Restoring Vista and dual booting" which, like I said before, requires me to have the Vista DVD. As you can see this is a really big "problem cycle" and is stopping me from doing this, please help. report abuse reply Japes: If you find yourself stuck without the Vista DVD to repair the boot files, because like a lot of us they weren't supplied with your new PC/laptop get yourself a copy of 'Vistaboot pro'. It's designed for just this problem. It's available FREE at http://www.vistabootpro.org/ It repairs your boot files very easily. report abuse Jack Bart: Dell Vostro 1000 laptop, came with Vista Business (just so I could have a laugh at it!) One thing I like about Dell, they give you a somewhat decent reinstall DVD for Vista, so at least you can play around with partitions, delete those bloody recovery partitions etc. (can't say that about my HP laptop). Anyway, used the EasyBCD tool and now dual booting Vista/XP. Great little app. Regarding virtualisation, I use it every day, but it ain't the answer to all your problems. report abuse reply reply
Jeremy: Hm, I got this working on one of my PCs, but I can't do it on my Acer laptop! The problem is after you've gotten XP in. On one attempt, the Vista DVD didn't detect any problems with startup etc (it's a pre-installed Vista, but I used a downloaded Vista DVD). On another attempt, it said it had successfully repaired the startup. In both attempts, it booted to XP after this stage, when it was meant to boot to Vista. report abuse reply Milt: Did you ever get this to work? I have an Acer with the exact same problem. I tried fresh installs with both and still run into xp booting.
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ANIKET: I HAVE PRELOADED VISTA ON MY VAIO.I WANT TO INSTALL XP TOO.BUT MY SYSTEM DOES NOT DETECT A XP BOOTABLE CD.IS IT A PROBLEM WITH THE XP CD OR VISTA IS NOT SUPPOSED TO ALLOW XP INSTALLATION???.[ MY BIOS SETTINGS R OK I.E. CD DRIVE HAVNG HIGHER PRIORITY??] report abuse Bios: This worked perfectly.. thanks so much for the instruction reply
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awm9750: My m9750 should be shipping sept 10th w/vista preinstalled on it. It comes with a vista dvd tho. Anyways my question is this: I have an external hard drive that is 320gb could I install windows xp on that and boot off that hard drive. If so how would I go about installing xp on it and booting off the external drive? I already know my lappy can boot off the usb therefore I just need to know how to get xp on the hard drive. Thanks report abuse reply
chas: I guess I'm not really as quick as I thought. I installed Vista on a Seagate 160 (SATA2) hard drive and XP on another Seagate 160 (SATA2) hard drive. I rebooted my computer (Dell) and nothing... It goes directly to Vista. The drive letters are shown in Vista as "C" (Vista) and "F" (XP) but it just won't go to one of the other as a dual boot. If I remove the cable from "C" and plug it into "F", "F" becomes "C" and it boots up perfectly to XP, but then Vista doesn't even show as the cables are not connected. I tried most of what I read in this blog but to no avail. Can anyone help and maybe tell me what I am doing wrong? report abuse Ryan: After installing the first phase of XP, on restarting I get the error "Error laoding operating system". I booted in to the Vista DVD and repaired the startup - it said it worked - but when I restart PC I get the same error. Trying to repair it again Vista says that there were no errors. How can I get back into Vista??? I am currently booted into my 'Ultimate Boot CD for Windows'. Please send me an email to ryzza007 {AT} gmail {DOT} com report abuse Ryan: If anyone else has a similar problem to mine - I solved it with the aid of this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 Ryan report abuse reply reply reply
bronxbadhan: Alrite, I am able to go through all the steps in this guide. I've partitioned by drive. However, when I put in the installation disc for XP, the Vista Program Compatibility Assistant does not let me install it. I don't know if I'm missing a step or something obvious that everyone else is getting. Please help. Thank you. report abuse reply
Justin: First, thanks for the killer article. I followed everything, and it worked great. My question now, though, is how do I get rid of Vista, and just have XP take up the whole disc? I've realized that Vista is still worthless (for the time being), and want to remove the whole partition... But as is, my XP partition is still E:\, and I'm wondering what would happen if I simply deleted my C:\ (Vista) partition... Would E: magically become C:? would all my application paths adjust correctly? How would I even go about fixing the boot manager so that it wasnt still trying to boot Vista? Thanks for any help you may have! report abuse reply Carson: @Justin, you need to know this: XP technically is always installed in what is called the BOOT drive [partition], so-called because the OS boots from there. That can be anywhere on the computer, even on Partition (Z) in your second hard drive.
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However, no matter where XP lives, the vital boot.ini file and NTLDR [= NT Loader] are automatically on Drive (C:). [The big problem with Vista is that it does not use the same boot-up system at all.] Now, Drive (C:) is called the SYSTEM drive [partition], because the system depends on it to get going. Normally this is a moot point, because both the system AND the OS files are on Drive (C:). If you have lots of partitions, and you keep your programs in a discreet partition, you can actually remove XP, reformat the partition (using a floppy), and put on a new XP, and it WILL WORK with your programsso long as it is set up the same way. Similarly (and this is pretty amazing, but I've tested it out) you can remove the SYSTEM FILES (by some external program) and you can re-format Drive (C:) and replace the system files and away you go again. This is a very hairy ride, and you have to be very carefulyou are replacing your car's ignition system WHILE you are driving down the street. So that background tells you that you can dump Vista altogether, so long as you do it carefully. It is not the Vista program that is problematic; it is the system boot files and the drivers that you have to watch. You should have a good external backup for these for XP. But, having said all that in regard to your question, I might ask now, why not just do a nice clean install of everything CLEAN, with a Maxtor PowerMax drive format while the system is down? You'd have your hard drive back to store-new condition. And you could set up any system of partitions you wanted, using the XP CD and later XP's very capable Disk Management partitioning (under Computer Management in XP). You generally don't need Partition Magic. Good luck. report abuse reply
Mike1231212411: i succesfully installed xp onto my vista home edition and can boot either one whenever i want. however, whenever i go into xp, the internet doesnt work, i've tried some things but nothing seems to work. plz help. report abuse reply l3oto: I had this same problem. I tried 2 things. I don't know which one worked but after I did both it worked fine. 1. Create an internet connection in the wizard and make sure you have an internet connection setup. 2. Go onto Vista and download all the drivers for your hardware into a folder you can access from XP that has the XP version of the drivers. Go onto XP and install all the drivers and you should be set!
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steveg: Is there a way to change the Vista boot loader to see XP without the Vista CD? My computer came loaded with Vista but no CD.
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Ron: I have a laptop with Vista installed. I've created a partition for XP. I reboot the laptop with the XP install CD and follow the steps to install XP. However I dont get a list of partitions (although these are visible in Vista) all I get is an error message saying no hard drives are found and press f3 to exit. Am I missing something obvious? I'd be gratefull for any help. Ron report abuse reply
noj: So i have everything setup, i installed xp on a separate partition and can successfully boot back into Vista. When i load the EasyBCD program and add xp to the list, it only lets me choose the drive path as C:, which is the same as Vista, instead of E: like on the pics. I went ahead and set XP to C: and now when i try to boot up xp it is just a black screen. vista still boots fine, but i really need my xp for some programs. any help is much appreciated!! report abuse reply mike: Did you ever find a solution to this? I just encountered the same problem after upgrading my motherboard. I can boot to Vista without a problem, but if I select XP at startup, I briefly get the "XP" logo and then it goes straight to a blank screen. When I run EasyBCD in Vista, I noticed that the existing XP installation shows up but indicates that it is on drive J (the Vista partition) instead of drive x (the XP partition); "J" is the only listed drive option in EasyBCD. While in Vista, I have no problem pulling up everything on the X partition, so I know everything is still there. report abuse reply
Alexander Mac Donald: I made a big mistake last winter when I purchased the Basic Home edition of Vista instead of XP, more out of curiosity than anything else. I find XP acceptable and thought, poor fool that Iam, that Vista might be better. It is the worst purchase I have ever made (except for a bed that caused me lower back, which was misdiagnosed as sciatica), and is really frustating to use. But I digress How do I get rid of it and install XP, if I can find a copy? I tried formatting another drive as a fat 32 DOS drive and installing my old copy of ME, with the intention of upgrading that to Windows 2000, from which I orginally upgraded to Vissta, and then upgrading from their to XP Home. Everything goes as it should until the computer reboots during the ME installation. The flash screen for ME comes on, and then the computer reboots again, and again and again. What is going on here? Has Vista altered the boot sector so as to exclude any other OS from running on my computer? What can I do? How can I regain use of my other spare hard drives? They all behave the same way now. report abuse Roberto: Great article! I had a system that already did a dual boot of Vista Ultimate and Vista Ultimate 64-bit to two separate drives. That was easy as Vista does it automatically when you install the 2nd one. But, I also needed to boot to Windows Server 2003. I followed these instructions to install Windows Server 2003 on the second drive along with Vista 64 bit and it worked perfectly. Thanks a ton for putting this out there. reply
report abuse Rashid: I have a new Toshiba Laptop which came bundled with Vista Home. It had two partitions one with Vista and other empty. Also, Toshiba gave a Recovery CD for installing Vista Home.
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Since I already had two partitions. Partitioning step did not bother me. I staright away installed XP into the second drive(this was called D:\ in XP. Then i booted with Vista Recovery CD provided by Toshiba. This was found useless as it said that it will erase and format my drives. So I felt real sad and waited in patience for some way out. I aborted plans to format. Then a friend of mine had a Dell Vista Re-installation CD. He gave me that. It worked as per the steps shown in this tutorial.
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Then I installed the EasyBCD in Vista and did as told in the tutorial. It worked perfectly well. By the way the XP Drive was shown to be E:\ drive in Vista and I used it. And I am glad things worked perfect. Thank God. Thanks APC for the good work. Rashid
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sizz: how long does the shrink take? i have a 170 gb hard drive and its taken more then 30 mins is this normal? and if u got a external hard drive can u install a OS on there?
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tiber: Worked quite well, but instead of using vista dvd o gpartition, in my case i used windows administrator to do the partition, u can find it easily in the help menu. Overall i didnt had no problems. Thanks
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n25philly: I love reading these comments. I can't remember the last time I've been on a website that has crammed so many comments that are filled with such pure BS as this one!
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Appleman: I am having the same problem as newdell where i get to the xp is loading but just before the f8/iagree thing a BSoD shows up about corrupted hard drives and virus scanning. anyonw with the same problem? any suggestions?
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Eyore298: HP laptop has Vista already installed. Do I have to reinstall it or can I just shut down the automatic updates etc... then go forth. I haven't touched it yet, this computer was bought to be dual boot format but couldn't figure out how to do it.
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Max: Hi, I've got a problem. I have bought an Acer laptop with pre-installed Vista. I've created unallocated space on the hard drive and tried to run the XP setup from the CD. Everything goes fine, until I press ENTER to start the installation. At this point, the XP setup cannot see any hard drive and stops the installation. Do you think that this is an issue with Vista or a problem with the hardware? Thank you in advance for the help! report abuse Kaz: Great article guys! Problem: Installed XP in Windows Vista folder. Need to uninstall it. CD doesn't work. Can't format because I don't have a Vista CD. Help please. I read every single post and couldn't solve my problem. report abuse reply magatsu: hi there kaz i to have installed windows xp on to a vista machine, and now need to delete it as it loads xp but not vista in any form, and i have no vista disc, have you solved your problem yet? and if so could you please direct me in the right direction? any help would be much appreciated. nick report abuse showmemagic: Hi There, this is a great walkthrough guide. I have one issue I need help with, I created a new Partition (E:) and it shows up in disk management and everything looks fine but when I load the up setup (step 'Now, install Windows XP') the second new partition is not displayed??? Can you help? reply reply
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reply ijavid: Some Windows XP installers, dosnt susports large HDDs. I have the same problem (250GB SATA, it was formated to 3 partitions, but it recognized as 69GB in unkown filesystem), I tried other install CD... worked!
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ijavid: At first, I installed with dual boot Vista + XP. The Vista is on 1st partition (C:), and the XP on 2nd (D:), E: and F: are CD and DVD writers. the booting works perfectly! the article is great! But I have got a problem: I tried to install some programs on Vista(64bit)... it not worked perfectly. I think its no problem, i will install on XP. then i tried, but when I started the Setup.exe file, it startedd to load the InstallShield wizard, but it stopped with an error. When I tried to install other program, the same error occured. (some dll is missing or corrupt, or cant start the windows installer... and similar errors) I think it is because the programs install wants to inicialize the installer from drive C:, but it is Vista 64bit How can I solve the problem? Reinstall XP on 1st partition and vista on 2nd? Or can I kill under XP the C: drive and rename D: to C: ?
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Russ Homans: This procedure was a great help. I had a little bit of question when it came to partitioning. My install of Vista had the diskpart application installed and didn't need the Vista installation CD for this step. I have a HP DV6000 computer and had to disable the SATA setting in BIOS. In XP I had to download all the device drivers but it was easy. I just did a google search for "HP DV6000 drivers" and found the HP site had all the drives conveniantly on one page. Thanks report abuse reply
mediwhapper: I just followed the directions and it works as promised. Dual boot selection every time I start it up. Running a Toshiba Satellite L35 w 2gb RAM and 80G hd. But now XP doesn't recognize most of my HW features, like, most importantly , the wireless nic. How do I get XP to see the HW on this box? Thx, MW report abuse reply
Allday: Dual boot was success with EasyBCD, but I tried the Vistabootpro 1st. Didnt work after some frustrating time. I loaded easyBCD and within a couple of minutes success
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reply Nadeem Afzal: I was running vista 64 short of lots of software still only xp compatible (eg Palm, Nikon - the list goes on). After reading your article I partitioned my drive (had Vista home 64) and installed windows XP. The installation was seamless - exact to the dot as described in your article. There were minor teething problems (EasyBCD 1.7 does the trick ) but each problem has been anticipated and answered in your article.
Now I have the best of both worlds on the same computer !!! I cannot thank you enough ... God Bless report abuse reply
Hjean: I had recently purchased an Acer 9810 with 2 hard drives. Vista Ultimate is installed on the first hard drive (partitioned C: and D: drives) and nothing is on the second hard drive (E:). Can I do a dual boot keeping Vista on the first hard drive and have Windows XP Pro (Microsoft volume licensing) on the second hard drive? My software is not Vista supported. The laptop came pre-installed without any Vista CD. The dual booting instructions provided are for a single hard drive with a Vista CD. Can anyone help me? Greatly appreciated report abuse reply
Moha: I did all the steps; shrink the hard drive, boot from the XP CD and got to the point where it asks you if you want to start a new install or a repair and I selected a new install. But there comes the problem, it is saying that there is no Hard Drive in the machine and I know there is cos I am using the laptop with Vista. My system is Tinkpad T61 7658CTO notebook. And I badlly need to have a DUAL BOOT. can someone please help me out here.
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Rodik: Windows XP installation will notice that C: is the primary (boot) partition and since it's also a NTFS partition it will put it's file NTLDR in there. Setting E: as drive in EasyBCD will break your Windows XP nicely since it wont find a NTLDR on E: Make sure drive is set to C: on Windows XP as well in EasyBCD! report abuse reply
Markli: Please help me I just got a Gateway GM5446E and i really need to find a way to get Vista and XP on the hard drive Ive tried all the reviews and have gone nuts nothing works. Gateway Specs is the link for my specs. When I try to install XP it just flashes to a Blue Screen with crazy #'s on it. Please help me!! Do I have to down grade my BIOS? and if so where do I get the files? Thank you in advance, -Markli report abuse BootKey: Maybe BootKey can help you. The latest version is available from www.BootKey.com. reply
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Anonymous623: Under control panel install program there is a way to select compatibility in that you can choose what OS you want to be compatible with. I had the CD in the drive and choose compatible with Windows XP SP2 and voila suddenly my install option was no longer grayed out. Talk about simple. NOw hopefully the rest will go as smoothly. report abuse reply makdaddy: does this mean you can install XP onto another partition while vista is running ? ( if so this would resolve my sata driver issues )
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Anonymous-reloaded: Hi there! Very good tutorial indeed. Nonetheless, I was not able to fully install XP Pro SP2 secondly to a Vista Ultimate x64 machine. I used a perfect original XP CD that began installation by partitioning and formatting the HD (in which I have installed the Vista
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x64) an then installed the XP files like a dream. However, when it reboots, the computer halts by the message "press any key to install from CD/DVD". Some funny colored ASCI characters also appears on screen (somewhat like a virus, though none was detected thru my previous scanning with both NOD32 and Norton). Any guess (and/or troubleshooting)? Thanks anyway. report abuse Kimble: Didn't Work...it keeps telling me that there is no hard drive (on Windows XP Setup) when there clearly is. reply
report abuse Meshuggah: Same for me, no hard drives available to choose where to install XP pro on.
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report abuse huyn54: well u should go into ur bios setup and into and disable ur native sata w/e there. and i dont recommend doing this on a computer pre-made for vista b/cuz that will seriously fck up ur cpu trust me.
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Philip Loftin: If this process has ended with your system giving you the message "Error loading operating system", here are the troubleshooting steps I did that finally resolve the problem for me. Keep in mind that some of these steps may be redundant and could be skipped; these are just the steps I took that ended in a success for me. 01. Boot up the system using the Vista DVD. 02. Click Next, then click Install. 03. Press Shift+F10 to open the console. 04. In the console, type DISKPART and press enter. This will open DISKPART. 05. In DISKPART, type LIST DISK and press enter. 06. Type SELECT DISK 0 and press enter (or your disk #). 07. Type LIST PARTITION and press enter. 08. Type SELECT PARTITION 0 and press enter (or your partition #). 09. Type ACTIVE and press enter. 10. Reboot and your original Windows Vista partition should load up like usual. If you want to try again with the dual boot process. Here are the steps I performed after getting back into Vista. 11. Open Disk Management, delete the new partition we created earlier in the tutorial, and the Logical partition it resides within. 12. Right-click the empty space and create a new partition of the desired size and format it NTFS (choose to quick-format if you like). This creates you a new PRIMARY ACTIVE partition. 13. Reboot using your Windows XP CD and install to the newly created partition. 14. After once again receiving the message "Error loading operating system", insert the Vista DVD and reboot using it and using DISKPART once again, make the newly installed XP partition the active partition. 15. Reinstall XP, choosing to format the drive NTFS (Quick). 16. Insert the Vista DVD and reboot using it and using DISKPART once again, make the Vista partition the active partition. 17. Reboot into Vista and install EasyBCD. 18. Then continue following the steps in the article to configure EasyBCD. (The only difference is when I was adding the Windows XP Entity, it would not let me select drive E. It had drive C selected and the drop-down list was disabled) Good luck! report abuse reply Gswiss: How would you go about deactivating native SATA when the BIOS option is not available and you get the "disk not recognized" message when installing xp with vista pre-installed?
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reply makdaddy: For the SATA issue ( which i suffered from myself) use this guide.. worked 1st time and flawlessly ( choose method 2.) i feel lucky to have found this guide as no amount of web searching seemed tho throw it up as a search result http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=111960
report abuse Yann M: You cannot install XP after you use Windows Vista or Windows PE 2.0 to create partitions on a hard disk. This is the title of Microsoft article #931760 dated Aug 29, 2007.
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The article describes exactly the problem I experienced: used Vista to create a partition for XP on my hard drive (HP Pavilion m8100n), started installation of XP SP2 Home Edition, got through the installation until the reboot request. At reboot, I get: "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Then all reboots ends up at the same point. Even if I ask the XP installation disk to reformat the partition. The hard disk has been checked with Hitchi DFT utility. It seems many people used either Vista or Windows PE to create the partitions, which MS says doesn't work, and got the errors indicated by MS: A disk read error occurred, Unable to load operating system, or Error loading operating system. I am ready to follow the workaround described in the article. Has anyone already tried this? Any word of wisdom? Thanks,
report abuse Jonathan: To whom this may concern.
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The NTFS and unallocated partitions of my C Drive cannot found by XP when it is installing. The Setup process will state the message that the hard discks cannot be found and them I am immediately directed to push "F3" to exit . How can I get XP to read these partitions? I currently have Vista installed on SONY VIAO. I want to dual boot report abuse reply Darklight: You might have to change your BIOS settings to boot from cd before harddrive, that can sometimes give you that problem.
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timmar: i have got vista pre installed on my lappy, and i want xp, right. i completely understand tutorial except one thing. i my lappy never came with a vista install disc, YET i have access to friends vista disc, so if i complete all the steps, and then go to use the VISTA REPAIR off the install disc, my question is, will it still repair the MBR, or will it tell me some error about not being the exact same disc it was installed from. timmar report abuse reply Colin: This will still work each and every vista disc is identical atm so there are no problems using your mates dvd or any vista disc for that matter (it'd even work if you had ultimate but he had home basic) they're all the same.
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reply frignoran: Help; hey, I have a dell inspiron with vista pre-installed. I wanted to use both vista and xp, so I installed xp on the same parttition as vista was installed. now I realise that I can nolonger run vista and I don'r have the cd. is there a way I can reverse that?
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MX: I don't see it mentioned anywhere: does this work with the OEM version of Windows XP Pro or does it require the Retail version?
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Jack: When I put in the xp disk, it loads up just fine, but when it gets to the prompt on where it'd like to be installed, it doesn't see my hard drive. Any of it, not even the parts that are partitioned.
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Phil: I have a Sony Vaio TZ150N/B. It came pre-loaded with Vista Business. I've got nothing against vista, beside the fact that it takes entirely WAY to much memory to run, so I opted for a dual boot of XP. Took me all day but I finally found a resolution to putting XP on a computer that has no restore CD but rather a recovery partition. Note: I have a copy of Windows XP PRO on hand. Started with using vista to shrink to a new partition, I went with 20GB. After the installation was complete I did a windows update, downloaded and installed the 2.0 .net framework. This as said in a previous comment will allow you to run EasyBCD on windows XP. When installed I opened EasyBCD and followed the instruction above. Restarted. Got a corrupt black screen prompt. Restored XP. After about 2 hours and a lot of time reading these posts I came to the conclusion that both XP and Vista needed to be booted out of the C: Partition. My setting screen in EasyBCD now looks like this: There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader. Bootloader Timeout: 30 Seconds. Default OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Entry #1 Name: Microsoft Windows Vista BCD ID: {current] Drive: C:\ Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe Windows Directory: \Windows Entry #2 Name: Microsoft Windows XP BCD ID: [3aad53d1-8aa6-11dc-bbob-001bfb1befb2} Drive: C:\ Bootloader Path: \NTLDR
This was the simplest way I found to fix the problem of a corrupt screen on start-up if you get one. Hope this helps somebody. report abuse reply
lesm: Erase programs and data! All this info is great, but I have one question, will all of this work have any effect on previously installed programs and data? I have just spent about two weeks trying to reinstall all of my programs and data and would hate to loose it all and have to start all over. I have Vista installed on Gateway MT6831 and would like to install XP for programs that will not work on Vista. report abuse reply
mburke: Have Dell inspiron 530 with 250gb harddrive. Vista Home came pre-installed and I followed the instructions and shrunk the vista parition to 110gb. I created two partitions on the remainding space with Vista disk management. When I installed XP it took up most of the partition which it shouldn't. If I don't use vista disk management and try to install xp it doesn't see the unpartitioned space ? Any suggestions ?
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Scott Scanlon: This is my take on things. Maybe it will help. http://sscanlon.spaces.live.com/?lc=1033 report abuse eric: i cannot compeleting installer my laptop, anyone can help? reply
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Fred: I have used the metod above, but when I finnish, it will not come up in Vista again. I have an acer Aspire 5610Z with Vista Basic, and tried to make dual boot with XP-Professional.
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reply frig: I have the same problem with an inspiron. I installed the xp on the same partition as vista was installed. anybody know what I should do to correct that?
report abuse silencer32: What are the disadvantages of dual booting, if someone would care to explain, I'd be greatly obliged.
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report abuse Josh: 'No HDD found' FIX
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'No HDD found'-problem when installing XP FIX
I don't know if it's the right way to do it but all I did was to remove the installation of HDD/SATA drivers on the XP installation CD and adding my own HDD drivers using the program nLite (dl at http://www.nliteos.com/download.html , I used v. 1.4).
I have a Dell M1730.
What I did: Run nLite and extract the files from your XP CD. When that's done, click 'Next' until you come to the 'Task selection'. Here, you can check off any of the tabs you wish to alter but to remove the built-in HDD drivers, click on the 'Components' tab. To integrate any of your own drivers click on the 'Drivers' tab. And, of course, to create the needed ISO you need to click on the 'Bootable ISO' tab. If you have done what I did you should see the integrate driver-page after clicking next. Do what you must here. I integrated a HDD/SATA driver (but I'm not sure if it got installed). After that you should see the 'Components' page. You can just click cancel on the first window that pops up if you don't need/want to mess with that. The HDD driver should be under 'Drivers'. Expand 'Drivers' and click on the HDD driver to remove it. Click next and it will be removed. Hereafter you can create the ISO.
I hope someone could use this. report abuse killerko: thanks, it worked for me! i got the same problem with my dell m1730.. now the xp instalator finally see the hdd :) reply
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Pascal: In your tutorial dual booting vista/xp with vista installed first, you do not address using two hard drives nor do you address how to repair vista when one doesn't have a vista original DVD and just the recovery DVD. Please clarify the use of separate hard drives and how to repair vista. thanks report abuse reply
Miguel: Thank you very much for this tutorial. I wanted a "triple-booting" with Ubuntu, and this method respected my grub. Now, I have Grub for selecting Linux or Windows, and EasyBCD for selecting Windows Vista or Windows XP. Thanks a lot.
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rrrrr: my notebook came with vista installed on a partition 100g and there is another partition about 8g a recovery partition,so in order to install xp with vista i've used the Disk MAngment from the controlpanel i choosed the partition on which vista is insatalled and shrinked the empty space in this partition. the problem is when i insert the boot xp cd,a blue screen named installing xp windows appears and some files like kernel and other are installed then i recieve a message in the same screen saying that my computer doesnt contain any diskdrives aaaor they aren't connected properly or there is something wrong with the configurations i cant find a solutionnn, can any one help me please?? report abuse reply SAM: XP does not contain SATA driver for the new laptops and XP expects to add via a floppy drive which most new laptops aren't equipped with. Using a USB floppy usually will not have workable results. I was able to install on a new ASUS laptop with a slip streamed install disk made with Nlite that contained the drivers. Google is your friend and here is one of the links I used http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/06/installing-sata-hard-drive-with-windows.html Good Luck, worked fine once I was able to make the slip streamed install disk. report abuse reply
raghda: helppp me plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzmy notebook has preinstalled vista home edition ,ti install xp with vista i faced the problem that xp cantfind diskdrives; to solve it i wentto the bios settings,disabled SATA after that the installation run successfuly. the problem is that xp cant read my network adapters so i have no net!!!!!! PLUS i cant go back to vista ,i'm automatically directed to XP; i've tried to enable SATA i thought this would solve vista problem but nthng happend i was directed to xp AGAIN receiving this blue screen"the COMputer has to shutdown to avoid image!!!!!!!!!!!!" cannn any one help me plzzzzz as i'm having exams and i do not really have any time for this vista thanks in advance
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s.d.: EasyBCD 1.7.1 did not manage to fix the bootloading problem. Then I checked more carefully and saw that the tutorial was done with EasyBCD 1.6. It managed to fix the problem, although it still shows that both OSs are on C: So, if the latest and greatest EasyBCD is not working, stick to 1.6. report abuse billbob784: can i dual boot vista preinstalled and xp on a external hard drive and then select xp or vista to use? reply
report abuse Jimzone: Vista 64 Ultimate and Asus M2N32 SLI motherboard (AMD dual core X2 6000, 4G RAM): Some twists to dual boot with XP installed on its own hard drive:
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1. Something (Asus motherboard?) is finicky with keyboards. The only combination that worked was to use a PS/2 keyboard at "press any key to boot from CD" then a USB keyboard for "press F6" and the rest of the installation. That took half a day to figure out. 2. For some reason the XP installer didn't like the way Vista had formatted the XP hard drive. The drive had worked fine with Vista but the XP install always hung at "Starting Windows". Where it asks for "leave the drive as is or quick format or full format" after 3-4 tries I had to use full format, then it installed. 3. Vista was in drive 0 (C:, SATA drive), XP was going in drive 2 (E:, ATA drive). With the SATA driver added with the F6 key during the XP install, XP did NOT overwrite the boot track on the SATA drive as expected. Only Vista would run until I made the following boot.ini file: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect So finally a good working dual boot after 2 days and a new keyboard that seems to suit everybody. Thanks for all the clues on your site, I couldn't have done it without them. report abuse Zira: Woww!! It's great, work well for me. My laptop Toshiba A135 was having trouble in dual booting because its vista must be installed in drive C: (recovery from manufacturer) but using the EasyBCD it's going well, the Vista installed in D and XP installed in E Thanks Bro!! report abuse reply Vista is garbage: I am not a mac guy, but I think Vista is garbage. So many 3rd party applications are not compatible (e.g. QuickBooks 2007, ATI PCI HD tuner cards, high performance graphics cards, etc.) and the new file manager is awful. MS had made so progress over the years with improving their software stability. I have worked on 3 Vista machines, all have had problems where they lock up. Even reinstalls from the rebuild disks did not resolve all of the issues. report abuse reply reply
gvi: What about deleting Vista after you install XP? This way you can still work, tweak XP occasionally, then kill Vista (I'm not too impressed after using it approximately a year)
report abuse zira: it's work on my laptop Toshiba A135!! thanks pal!
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report abuse darshan: plz help
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Create a second partition using the Windows XP installer screen above by selecting the free space on the drive and pressing "C" to create a partition (if prompted, choose NTFS as the file system.) in this step when i press c i get this error .. error:- setup cannot create a new partition in the space you selected because the maximum no of partition already exist on the disk ...
wat shud i do to fix it up ??? plz help its urjent ... report abuse Jimzone: Problems after successful dual boot 1. After 2-3 days of using the dual boot with no problems, the dual boot option suddenly disappeared. This happened after an automatic update in XP and I'm turning off automatic updating to avoid this in the future. I got it working again with EasyBCD but it wasn't easy. As soon as I told it there was an XP installation, EasyBCD would disable the drive selector with C: showing but I have XP on the E: drive. After closing & restarting EasyBCD a few times and trying different things, it turned out that it worked if I first selected the correct drive letter, then second told it which operating system was located there. 2. This 2nd problem isn't solved yet. Read Microsoft knowledge base article kb926185. It says that with dual booting, every time you start the computer with XP it will delete ALL of the restore points in Vista plus all but the latest complete system backup in Vista. How can they let something like that happen without fixing it like a year ago? They say the best way to avoid this is to use the Bitlocker security feature in Vista to keep XP from seeing anything on the Vista drive or partition. Not sure if all versions of Vista have Bitlocker but I have Ultimate and it's there. I'll probably do the Bitlocker thing but it sounds like a snake pit that's bound to cause other problems. report abuse Jimzone: Follow up on 2nd problem reply reply
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The more I read about Vista's Bitlocker the worse it sounded, and it's only available in the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Vista anyway. My motherboard doesn't have the encryption chip that Bitlocker needs so I would have to keep the encryption key on a usb drive and lose the hard drive data forever if I lost the encryption key. So forget that option. What does work just fine to protect Vista's restore points is to make the addition to XP's registry that Microsoft suggests in kb926185. As soon as I did it, XP saw the Vista drive as just "local drive" (the name I had given it vanished). When I tried to read the Vista drive in XP there was no visible data on it and XP no longer deletes any of Vista's files. Microsoft's instructions for modifying the XP registry are a bit cryptic and wrong in one aspect - it says that Vista will put its restore points on a different hard drive if there is one, but in fact you can specify which drive you want to use and it defaulted to the Vista drive. So by hiding the Vista drive in XP's registry it also hid the restore points from XP. report abuse reply
KuZuKiE: Hey, I have a problem on XP, the sound doesn't work and when I try to fix it, it says that there isn't anything pluged in, but when I go to vista, the sound works perfectly fine. Does anyone have this problem and know what I can do to fix it?
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J4mmY: The partition I shrunk for Vista to stay on only shrunk by 9GB it had around 60gb free space on it, its a 160gb hdd (149 really). Now I'm going through the process of putting XP on a 8880MB partition which is pointless as I need room to put all my games on XP side for increased performance. How can I further shrink my vista partition and increase the XP partition? Help would be appreciated, thanks :) report abuse reply ozedge: Can you just use the disk management GUI to manually shrink the partition?? Thats what i did in the first place... it lets you choose the size you want
report abuse dscole: I have a laptop with a sata hard drive I have used nlite to put drivers on xp but I get a blue screen help if anyone knows a step by step on using xp with sata drivers let me know
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Muzkat: When XP was installing its initial setup files, it restarted on me, and I received the "Error loading operating system" message. Repairing the boot/startup with the Vista DVD did not help. Nor did formating the partition with the XP files on it. I panicked, as you do when you can't get into your computer and when you are envisaging loosing your files. So, what I did was the following: Boot with the Vista DVD, select "Repair," and then select "Command Prompt." Type in bootrec.exe and press ENTER. You will receive some options to repair the boot. Type in bootrec/fixboot and press ENTER. (This didn't work for me actually, but if you have the problem that I did, you might as well try this anyway. It might work for you.) Then type in bootrec/fixmbr and press ENTER. When you have done that, restart, if your computer doesn't do so automatically. Allow your computer to boot normally (ie: don't boot from a CD or DVD) and Windows should do two memory tests on your system. When this is finished, even if Windows did not find any problems, your computer should boot into Vista and your startup sequence should be fixed. Incidentally, if that doesn't work for you, then you can also type in the following under the command prompt on the Vista Repair screen: bootrec/rebuildbcd then press ENTER. But I can't verify if that works as I didn't need to use that option. I hope that everyone that gets that "error loading operating system" finds aid in my post. I know I got very anxious not being able to boot into anything. I don't want to sound nasty, but I feel this article should have covered what to do in such a situation, instead of leaving me high, dry, and desperate. It took me awhile to find this solution. And after this happening to me, I can honestly say dual booting XP isn't worth it. Most of my stuff runs on Vista, and I run old apps and games. Vista isn't that bad - all it needs is a decent Service Pack, which should be on its way soon. report abuse reply billy john: I have followed everything and it works great but on XP my internet wont work and when I unplug and plug my modem it ses that it has malfunctioned and won't work. Is there any way to fix this or another way to get online?
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Berhurts: I also suffered the "error loading operating system" problem right after the Windows XP installer reboots the computer for the first time. I couldn't get into my Vista or continue the XP installation. Vista's boot-repair-thingy didn't do squat for me. A previous advisory post gave me the idea to do this: Run the XP setup again and use it to turn your intented XP partition into two partitions. Install XP on the first of these two new partitions (meaning your original drive now has 3 partitions on it) Let it run until it reboots your computer until you see "error loading operating system" (you never know, it might decide it wants to work). Reboot with the Vista DVD and install an new copy on the third partition that you created. When this reboots the machine you'll be able to choose to boot into your original Vista (but when you choose, both are listed with the same name. If you get the right one you'll boot into Vista normally, if you get "preparing to run for the first time blah blah..." then reset and pic the other one). Now happily back in your original Vista, you can use EasyBCM to add the entry for the XP. Reboot and you'll be able to complete the XP installation by choosing the XP OS on the selection screen. After that, all you have to do is delete the extra Vista partition and use the extra space on another partition (this will also remove the duplicated Vista entry on the OS selection screen). And you're done! Note: Be really careful about knowing which partition is which...I advise labeling your partitions with names rather than going on drive-letter
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alone...because I almost wiped my original Vista installation. This my layman's way of avoiding all the command prompt etc. fiddling with the doo-dah's. I hope you find it useful! report abuse Dave Jackson: BCD Dosen't Read Windows XP at all. I did everything the right way too! To hell with this, doesn't work for me. reply
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VWFeature: I found my Vista disks did not offer me the option of 'rescue' and after installing XP I couldn't boot into either OS. I tried adding Ubuntu, hoping it would fix the boot manager, but no good. What DID work was at the following link, which includes instructions on using EasyBCD . A lifesaver!! http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+with+EasyBCD report abuse reply
SrAMagistrado: I just want to reiterate just incase it hasn't been pointed out, if you can't change the drive letter in EasyBCD when you're setting up dual boot just let it be. For some reason the new version of EasyBCD automatically does it for you, I dunno how but I pondered for 30 mins if I want to restart but it all worked out fine. Thanks for this guide and the author, now I can play my games in XP and do normal stuff in Vista. Again, thanks. report abuse ozedge: Yeah i just completed it and found the same thing.. went the to the EasyBCD forums and found that the new versionautomatically searches for the XP location I managed to complete this dual boot procedure first time without any problems... and i was really surprised as i was expecting problems anyway thanks heaps!!! i can now develop on xp which is required but keep my vista machine which i love report abuse Anonymous1973: thanks a lot for this article. yesterday I added another 250GB hard disk to my Acer T660 with Vista Home premium and installed XP Pro. I didn't have to use any other document or do any troubleshooting 'cos this procedure worked great!!! Now I have a nice clean dual boot system.... report abuse reply reply reply
Derek: I am trying to dual boot Vista and Win 2000 Pro (prefered for various reasons) and have been unable to find any guidance online for this senario. Has anyone attempted this and is the dual installation process the same as XP? Any help here would greatly be appreciated. report abuse reply
Fred Karmally: I have a Sony Vaio laptop with 2 hard drives of 160 GB each. It has Windows Vista installed. I want to use the other 160 GB hard drive (nothing on it) to install Windows Server 2000 (so I can run SQL server 2000). Is there any way I can do this?
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Serbia: Everything except the part when u need to go to repair is working ok. But even if u skip that part and use EasyBCD to rebuild boot for Vista it is working just fine. Thanx for tips.
report abuse chhuck12: DUAL DRIVE boot problem (Vista+XP) Hi everyone, I have 2 HDDs, 1 SATA with Vista x64 HomePremium and 1 IDE with Windows XP Home.
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I installed Vista first, disconnected the SATA and installed XP on IDE. Now, both OS are working perfectly but the big thing is that I have to change my hard drive priority in my bios each time I want to boot with a different OS. I already tried a lot of solutions like changing my boot.ini with XP and changed my BCDedit with VistaBootPro and EasyBCD with Vista. None is working. I got the choice list but my PC never wants to boot the other OS (XP when I boot with my SATA or Vista with my IDE in first priority.) Which way should I continue trying. Any ideas to solve this problem? report abuse gudin: I have similar issue... Toshiba satelite P200 laptop came with Vista preinstalled. I unpluged drive, connected external USB HD, and installed Windows XP on it.Reconnected internal HD, and I can boot in both OS but only with the help of BIOS boot order. I tried EasyBCD, but it does not work.Vista boots fine , but Windows XP gives me ntldr error (and if I specify drive D in easy BCD-laptop just rebots after selecting XP from dual boot order). Is it possible to get working dual boot, with Windows XP installed on external HD and Vista on main(internal) disk. Thanks, G report abuse reply chhuck12: I tried to install GAG. When I saw the graphics of that and made my windows vista recognize a new floppy disk, even if I don't have any...I uninstalled it right away, from there, XP didn't want to boot anymore so, I tried some Google researches repairs for ntldr, none was good for me. I format my IDE drive with Vista to reinstall XP, but with the XP install, I accidently format my Vista too! The XP install didn't recognize my IDE anymore just my SATA. So, don't try what I did! report abuse Patrick: reply reply
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Hi Sjd, I bought Sony Vaio FZ240E with pr-installed Vista Home pr, Please i was trying to load XP pro on it. I used DISKPART to do partion on vista & created G: dirve. Now when i put Win XP cd in cd-drive & restarted my pc it has started istallation process for xp but i got Error saying Hard disk not found. Please let me know what should be reason?
report abuse Moto: Thanks. Worked like a charm once I managed to make windows xp see my sata drive. (had to slipstream the drivers in) search for DriverPacks in google if you have the same problem. It should be one of the first things to pop up. I had to use "DriverPack MassStorage" Note: I was just being lazy and size wasn't an issue. report abuse oldtimer: i followed your tutorial and got vista and xp installed. you said the following:
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More importantly, applications which have installation paths hard-coded into their install scripts rather than using Windows system parameter variables could easily dump files into C: when they should be installing to E:. This isnt such a great situation. i now have C: (Vista) and F: (XP) how can i get both to show in in C when i boot into each? report abuse reply
Discotechnique: Hi I'm pretty computer ilterate but have followed the instructions to the letter until I get to the part where it askes to install xp. When I try to do this I am getting a message that says "This program is blocked due to compatibility issues" "Setup cannot continue because the version of Windows on your computer is newer than the version on the CD" Please can anyone help? report abuse reply
Kiki: Hi, I don't have time to read through the 300 some posts on this article, but I was wondering if it was possible to do this without any type of disk. I bought a new laptop (HP) with Vista Home Premium, but I want to dual boot with XP. The laptop didn't come with any type of boot disk of window's vista, nor a repair disk (that I know of.) So, I'm wondering if it's possible to find any of the files I need online. You don't have to tell me if it's against rules, a yes or no will do. Thanks. report abuse reply Canifrou: Do yourself a favor and please read the postings. It's shorter, you'll find your answer before you get to 300, you'll have an unwipeable smile on your face and non of the bruises from banging your head against a wall, like I did - unless you like that kinda stuff. Best regards. CHAU! report abuse reply
MandyApril4: I have a new computer with vista home premium on the hard drive. I took the hard drive out of my old computer and it has vista home basic on it. I want to install the 2nd hard drive also and have never done anything like this before. I don't know if it would be best to partition the drive(s) or run it as a dual-boot system...I have never opened up a computer before so is this something I can do on my own or would I have to call a professional? I know I sound very naive...but when it comes to this I am! Any help on what to do and how to do it would be VERY much appreciated!! report abuse reply
AnonymousLOLOOL: Thank you. This guide helped a lot. I had the same problem. I installed Vista and my CPU was not working properly. Now i reinstalled it and it is working thanks to this guide. Thanks!
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jaomadn: hi im a bet dazy now cause i cannot dual boot to vista ultimate and xp..i already follow the direction above but still can't boot.i already install xp first and vista next because vista will handle the dual boot but still cannot boot to xp.xp partition is seen in vista but cannot always boot to vista even i used the easy bcd..and then installes vista and xp next and used easybcd but still cannot dual boot.im frustrated now..i almost follow any instruction in the post but..about this partition naming o label.i already installed xp to c: and vista to d: but after boot to vista the drive change vista to c: and d: to xp..that happen in boot vista first and xp first.i alreaedy to the boot.ini,ntldr.ntdetect.com and still i cannot dual boot..pls help.. i almost take 24 hrs to do this things.. report abuse reply
vshut (Newbie): I am a novice at this as are others that have posted their comments. I am also frustrated with some of Vista's operations. There are a lot of good comments and troubleshooting ideas in this forum but is there a revised instruction guide for installing XP with Vista already installed with all the helpful hints and troubleshooting ideas. With only the one computer which is used for work, I cannot afford to be without it if something goes wrong. Is it better to pay and take it to someone who is more proficient in computers so my downtime is minimised. I know I can read through all the comments, which I have read about half now, but it I miss something crucial, there goes my computer until I get it restored. Good comments from you all. Keep up the good work. report abuse reply
cris (Newbie): I have ah vista os but japanese, then I would like to install an xp I have already a partition but when i install the xp the system said that i dont have a hard drive. why?
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reply Michael (Newbie): I pulled up this web site because I'm in the process of buying a new computer. I know it will come pre installed with Vista so I am already checking out what the process will be to dual boot. The question I want to ask which is better dual booting the way it comes and add XP, or formatting the hard drive installing XP Pro as my main partition then putting Vista as the second partition? I don't mind doing it if it's something that will make a
difference. I read both guides (partitioning Vista to XP and partitioning XP to Vista), I've scanned through most of every ones comments on both pages and haven't seen anyone ask this yet.
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I've dual booted many drives in the past with 2000 and XP (even tri booted before with Linux for someone) But I have no experience with Vista at all besides hearing all the horror stories of how many problems people are having. So any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Michael
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apong168 (Newbie): Boot and load your Vista DVD. Repartition into 2 partitions and format. Install Vista into the first partition. Then Boot your Win XP CD and install windows into the second partition. Windows XP will boot. To boot Vista, boot Vista DVD and choose Repair (StartUP. Restart and you will see on your screen Windows Vista and Windows XP. Choose anyone and boot. And you will have a Dual Boot Vista and XP report abuse petemason99 (Newbie): Here,s my story:I recently had issue with my dual boot system ntldr missing etc. I eventually managed to solve the problem by installing easyBCD in my vista system. With this app it is very simple to change the default boot op sys. Also the timeout. Ie time u get to change to other op sys. Also name of op sys. reply
But most importantly for me and I hope u, it showed that XP (my default op sys) was trying to boot from a deleted partition. This can easily be changed to the correct drive. Go into change settings, and under "choose op sys to change associated settings" Choose the faulty op sys and hopefully u will see that it is trying to boot from the wrong drive. Just type in letter of drive:\, ie D:\ I think my problems arose from deleting partitions with partition magic. I also made a restore to a previous HDD image (using ghost 2003) just before i had the issue. Unfortunately easy BCD only works on Vista, but for anybody having this issue on a single boot op sys with XP, the missing ntldr problem on startup can be fixed by going into the microsoft recovery console, and type in fixboot at the prompt. Finally, if u really can`t find ntldr and NTDETECT on the XP partition (although I find hard to believe that they have been lost) u can easily copy and paste them directly from folder i386 in an XP installation disk. Paste them directly in the root of the XP partition. U can perform this while running your Vista sys. Hope this helps. Pete.
report abuse petemason99 (Newbie): Here,s my story:I recently had issue with my dual boot system ntldr missing etc. I eventually managed to solve the problem by installing easyBCD in my vista system.
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With this app it is very simple to change the default boot op sys. Also the timeout. Ie time u get to change to other op sys. Also name of op sys.
But most importantly for me and I hope u, it showed that XP (my default op sys) was trying to boot from a deleted partition. This can easily be changed to the correct drive. Go into change settings, and under "choose op sys to change associated settings" Choose the faulty op sys and hopefully u will see that it is trying to boot from the wrong drive. Just type in letter of drive:\, ie D:\ I think my problems arose from deleting partitions with partition magic. I also made a restore to a previous HDD image (using ghost 2003) just before i had the issue. Unfortunately easy BCD only works on Vista, but for anybody having this issue on a single boot op sys with XP, the missing ntldr problem on startup can be fixed by going into the microsoft recovery console, and type in fixboot at the prompt. Finally, if u really can`t find ntldr and NTDETECT on the XP partition (although I find hard to believe that they have been lost) u can easily copy and paste them directly from folder i386 in an XP installation disk. Paste them directly in the root of the XP partition. U can perform this while running your Vista sys. Hope this helps. Pete.
report abuse petemason99 (Newbie): I recently had issue with my dual boot system ntldr missing etc. I eventually managed to solve the problem by installing easyBCD in my vista system.
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With this app it is very simple to change the default boot op sys. Also the timeout. Ie time u get to change to other op sys. Also name of op sys. But most importantly for me and I hope u, it showed that XP (my default op sys) was trying to boot from a deleted partition. This can easily be changed to the correct drive. Go into change settings, and under "choose op sys to change associated settings" Choose the faulty op sys and hopefully u will see that it is trying to boot from the wrong drive. Just type in letter of drive:\, ie D:\ I think my problems arose from deleting partitions with partition magic. I also made a restore to a previous HDD image (using ghost 2003) just before i had the issue. Unfortunately easy BCD only works on Vista, but for anybody having this issue on a single boot op sys with XP, the missing ntldr problem on startup can be fixed by going into the microsoft recovery console, and type in fixboot at the prompt. Finally, if u really can`t find ntldr and NTDETECT on the XP partition (although I find hard to believe that they have been lost) u can easily copy and paste them directly from folder i386 in an XP installation disk. Paste them directly in the root of the XP partition. U can perform this while running your Vista sys. Hope this helps. Pete.
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xtreme1 (Newbie): Please help! I am trying to install a second xp os on a second hdd, but xp does not seem to allow me to install on a second hdd. I also tried using P Magic 8, but it also only allows installing on the first hdd. I tried disconecting hdd1, but for some reason xp says boot failed. I would prefer not to format the partition on hdd 2 as it will take me nearly one week to reinstall all my programs. any ideas welcome. i feel like i am at a toilet with a bent penny :) - cheers Rod report abuse reply
am321 (Newbie): I followed the steps up until I had to install WinXP. The bluescreen always shows up with messages: "A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer...... Technical information:***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF78D6528,0xc0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000) The computer is a Gateway GT5628 w/ two SATA drives. I need to get the WinXP due to the incompatibility of my technical software that cannot be upgraded. Could anyone help me, please? report abuse jeyojo (Newbie): reply
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if i configure dual boot, will my files be lost? i have a lot of valuable work saved on my computer, and i don't want to lose it.
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jeyojo (Newbie): if i configure dual boot, will my files be lost? i have a lot of valuable work saved on my computer, and i don't want to lose it.
report abuse jeyojo (Newbie): if i configure dual boot, will i lose my files? i have a lot of work saved that is vital.
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report abuse jeyojo (Newbie): if i configure dual boot, will i lose my files? i have a lot of work saved that is vital.
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bad_code (Newbie): I just tried to create a media/theater PC with Vista Ultimate 64Bit because I have 8GB RAM. Got the AuzenTech Prelude 7.1 and it fails right and left for anything other than 2 channel sound, digital or analog. Their tech support gave me a canned email response to my problem. Needless to say tomorrow morning I am doing this to my PC (Piece of crap) no Mac are not PCs (Piece of Crap) of course they don't run windows so they have an advantage. ;) April 2, 2008 8PM EST report abuse reply AzzMAN (Newbie): PCs are great for running linux and when I bought my new Toshiba Satelite I was naturally shocked to learn that it had vista not xp like the ad said. so I tried to reinstall freespire(a linux) and vistas bootloader appears halfway through the installation 3 times. I was wondering if anyone knows where to get a better hDD partitioner than has been mentioned on this page so far. + XP student edition is the only version I had that didnt have vistas bootloader appear. ++++Macs are not very good because they are a media computer while windows are for office work and gaming and linuxes are for programming and hacking and everything else ++++Just format your macs hDD and install linux before its too late. ++++Apple has been going downhill since iPod touch Look at the macbook air---- No Optical Drive and Way too thin report abuse reply
Theresa4C (Newbie): Hello .. I have been trying for weeks to fix my proublem. I had Windows XP pre installed on my computer. Then some Jerk I took my computer to to get fixed decided to install Vista on my computer. He thought he was doing me a favor. I am very unhappy about this. I am now trying to get my windows xp back on and get everything that has to do woth Vista OFF !. Well, I did all I had to do but I can't seem to get rid of this error " SW BUILD ID DIFFERENT FROM ID ON RECOVERY MEDIA" I Have no clue what to do now. I been looking all over the internet trying to find something that I could do to fix this Issue. So If anyone out there knows what I am talking about I would love to hear from you. I am at my witz end. You can post it here but can you also email me incase I loose this site somewhere in my junk. I would love that :) .. Theresa ( Theresa4C@aol.com ) report abuse reply
Bambi300 (Newbie): Can anyone help me. Ive already got my hard drive partition, but when i got to install xp it gives me an error saying compatibly issues, and xp doesn't boot up like the steps said it would.
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Bambi300 (Newbie): Can anyone help me. I've already got my hard drive partitioned, but when I go to install xp it gets me a compatibility errors saying I cant load it up.
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positivepause (Newbie): I have recently purchased the n713nr compaq laptop with XP Vista Basic. Like other I also didn't liked XP Vista so I just created the recovery DVDs as per the process and then formatted the computer and now I am trying in to install the XP Professional . I had to disable to SATA HDD from the BIOS , but after the format option where I deleted all the partitions which came with the computer using the XP installation Menu and selected the formatting option. The computer Hang after some time. So I restarted the computer but It never able to detect the XP CD again. I tried tons of time..So used the USB bootable stick but it gave me errors like NTLDR.DLL then somehow I got get rid of that now I am getting HAL.DLL error. In order to get the computer back working I thought of went back to Vista but the recovery DVD also could not work as It does not detect the DVDs. I went to the store , they don't know how to solve the problem as the Recovery DVDs are not working. I am totally lost...what to do now..Please help.
report abuse Reb (Newbie): Ok, I am totally lost and so is the new computer.
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I have a HP Pavillion m8400f that came preloaded with Vista Home Premium. I do not have a disk for the Vista program. I have tried to load the dual OS configuration and got as far as installing XP. When XP tried to reboot, a disk read error came up. I think I have read all the notes related to this problem several times. I have tired each one, none worked. If I can't get the two systems to worked together, I would like to get the Vista back. Can anyone help Wyndell Taylor taylorw3416@comcast.net report abuse Rezn0r (Newbie): damnit. after installing xp but before the GUI part of winxp setup, I get this: "Error loading operating system" report abuse steveh (Newbie): reply reply
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to restore vista for dual booting it seems as though you need the vista DVD to reboot with. unfortunately i have no physical disk rather it's already installed on my system (i used gparted to split the C drive). what should i do at this point to repair the vista start messenger Search: up?
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report abuse elektroboy (Newbie): Hi I just tryed to dualboot vista home basic and xp following the tutorial,it all went ok untill during the xp installation the pc reebooted. It loads the GUI up to the hard drive and it stops after that! please if anybody knows why and how to fix this it would be of grear help. report abuse elektroboy (Newbie): Hi I just tryed to dualboot vista home basic and xp following the tutorial,it all went ok untill during the xp installation the pc reebooted. It loads the GUI up to the hard drive and it stops after that! please if anybody knows why and how to fix this it would be of grear help. report abuse
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alexander (Newbie): I Dual Boot XP and Vista just fine. However, when I try Windows Update on Vista it is trying to create a Recovery Point before installation of the updates and since it cannot create it it just gets stuck. Any experiences or suggestions? Alexander alexandr@tampabay.rr.com report abuse reply
kkt (Newbie): I have toshiba satellite u305 series laptop. Whenever i try to install xp (i wanted to have dual os),windows xp bootable cd/dvd doesnot recognise my harddrive, it simply says "harddrive not found". Any suggestion to fix the problem is heartly welcome.
report abuse SamVDC (Newbie): Understood that after installed Vista but Xp sees but won't boot it..... Is it possible that just by editing the BOOT.INI directly from XP's Start Up & Recovery panel by adding VISTA into it? Would it make a dual boot that way? report abuse I have a question. (Newbie): Will this work with a Vista upgrade CD?
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lrock23201 (Newbie): What if I do everything correctly, but I am able to log on to Windows XP Pro. but I don't have the option to boot to Windowws Vista?
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Nanoxy (Newbie): I have the Windows XP installation in another HardDrive in a folder. My Windows Vista Home Premium is on C Drive. My question is can I install Windows XP by just double clicking the setup icon like if I were to install an application using the second harddrive to install it. My PC have two (2) harddrive report abuse rosy_glow (Newbie): Excellent article, saved me many hours of reconfiguration, worked first time for me rosy_glow report abuse ladylibra018 (Newbie): im having problem when i put the XP pro cd.. and went to the part where u supposed to delete the partition... it says... Unknown disk... :( reply reply
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How To Dual Boot Vista and XP With Vista Inst

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How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide

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report abuse Jigga:

Nice article... thanks a million.

report abuse KWR: Two issues...

report abuse The17thsailor: HA!

report abuse JL: I was wondering this myself

report abuse anandsmailbox: Hi,

report abuse trouble getter: i get same problem!!!help!!!!

Then all should work ....

report abuse Lesley Hibbs: get a life

report abuse wutdlandish: after reading this:

Thanks report abuse reply

I also need ideas.

report abuse johnny:

report abuse steve.dan: Hi

report abuse Jonathan: To whom this may concern.

report abuse Josh: 'No HDD found' FIX

'No HDD found'-problem when installing XP FIX

I have a Dell M1730.

report abuse darshan: plz help

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