How to install XP after Vista and dual boot the system
By Jonathan Schlaffer
If you’re one of the types that is just so annoyed with Vista that you would rather be using XP but not have to reformat your hard drive then you might want to give this a read.
This may or may not be worth doing depending on how badly you want to keep Vista and use XP from time to time. If you don’t want to lose data on the Vista side of things, you can either back it up now and just wipe your whole drive and start XP from scratch, provided that’s not the case, let’s move on.
It’s no secret that Vista and XP don’t really place nice when installed on the same hard drive, in fact, Vista doesn’t really play nice with other operating systems besides itself so there’s going to be a bit of work to do.
The whole list of steps was written up in a rather to easy understand article at CVG (Computer and video games) so head over there on how to partition the drive (within Vista) and installing XP.
Though, I’ll add a note about partitioning the drive, it might fail. Vista’s implementation of a partitioning tool isn’t too terribly bright and if there are any system files sitting in the space that the new partition will use then the process will fail and may give an error about “not enough free space” when there usually is. There isn’t much you can do here, running a boot time defrag might help, even running defrag within Vista itself might help as well as clearing out junk files.
If it still fails after that then you will have to use something like Partition Magic or Partition Logic to resize the drive, both will rearrange files as necessary so as to not interfere with the resizing operation.
After that, and you’ve installed XP, note that Vista will no longer be available as bootable so you’ll have to use your Vista DVD to perform a “startup repair” and now Vista will boot but XP is no longer available, to correct that you will need EasyBCD to configure the bootloader. Again, full instructions can be found right here.
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