http://www.thenationonlineng.com/dynamicpage.asp?id=64239

THE question is basically "How do I install a dual-boot with Windows XP on my new Windows Vista computer?" The answer is that it’s not that difficult, it’s just very time consuming, and you need to own a copy of Windows XP. Note that you should not attempt this please if you are not ready to troubleshoot any problems that might occur.

The first issue we encounter is that computers with pre-installed operating systems take up the entire drive. Luckily Microsoft included the Shrink volume feature in Vista, so we can easily shrink the Vista partition down to make room for XP.

To do this, Open the Computer Management panel, which you can find under Administrative tools or by right-clicking the Computer item in the start menu and choosing Manage. Find the Disk Management item in the list and select that.

Now we’ll shrink our volume down by right-clicking on the main hard drive and choosing Shrink Volume. You can choose the size that you want to shrink, which really means you are choosing the size that you want your XP partition to be. Whatever you do, do not just use the default. Most of the time I chose roughly 20gb by entering 20,000 into the amount.

The next step might be confusing, because we need to change the cd-rom drive that’s invariably taking up D: at the moment, because we want to use D: for the Windows XP partition, but it is already taken by the cd-rom drive. If you skip this step than XP will install onto the E: drive, which is not the end of the world, but it is not quite as tidy, because you will need to always remember that your Windows Xp is on the E drive not the next logical drive partition D: after the boot partition C:.

To change the Cd-rom drive letter to E: Right-click on the cd-rom drive in the list and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.

Now we’ll change the CD drive to use E: by selecting that in the drop-down.

We can now create a new partition to install the Windows XP on and make sure that the drive letter is set the way we want. If you do not create a partition now, the XP install will do so automatically, but it’s easier and cleaner to create the partition yourself.

To create the partion that XP will be installed on Right-click on the Unallocated free space area that you have created when you sharak the Windows Vista and then select New Simple Volume from the menu.

ollow through the wizard and select whatever options you’d like, making sure to use D: as the drive letter.

Now you will need to close the disk management and reboot your computer. This is because we can not do the next step until we reboot.

After rebooting… open up Computer from the start menu and then right-click on the D: drive and select properties. Give your partition a meaningful name like "XP". It would be wise to name the C: drive to "Vista" at this point as well.

Now pop in your XP cd into the drive and boot off it. You may have to configure your BIOS to enable booting off the CD drive, or if your computer says something like "Hit Esc for boot menu" you might want to use that.

Once you come to the screen where you can choose the partition to install on, then choose either the unpartitioned space or the new partition you created. Whatever you do, do not try and install onto your Vista partition! Generally it is much cleaner to label each partition distinctly

After you have completely installed Windows XP, you would have lost your ability to boot into Windows Vista, so you will need to use a software utility like VistaBootPro utility, to restore the Vista boot loader.

You can download and install VistaBootPro from www.vistabootpro.org or if you are a member of the TheNation Databank’s PCUser2User Club, you would either have it on one of your disc libraries or just request a physical copy or get one dropped into you email box by the club.

During the installation of Vistaboot Pro, you will be forced to install the .NET 2.0 framework. Open up VistaBootPRO and then click on the System Bootloader tab. Check the "Windows Vista Bootloader" and then "All Drives" radio buttons, and then click on the Install Bootloader button.

At this point, the Windows Vista bootloader is installed and you’ll only be able to boot into Vista, but we will fix that. Instead of manually doing the work, we will just click the Diagnostics menu item and then choose Run Diagnostics from the menu.This will scan your computer and then automatically fill in the XP version. Click on the "Manage OS Entries" tab and then click in the textbox for Rename OS Entry, and name it something useful like "Windows XP" or "The Windows That Works"

Click the Apply Updates button and then reboot your computer… you should see your shiny new boot manager with both operating systems in the list!

If you get an error saying "unable to find ntldr" when trying to boot XP, you’ll need to do the following:

·Find the hidden files ntldr and ntdetect.com in the root of your Vista drive and copy them to the root of your XP drive.

·If you can’t find the files there, you can find them in the \i386\ folder on your XP install cd

This is a critical piece of information: Windows XP will be installed on the D: drive, even in Windows XP… so you’ll need to keep that in mind when tweaking your system.

You can share information between the drives, but I wouldn’t recommend messing with the other operating system’s partition too much… it might get angry and bite you. Or screw up your files. What I do recommend is that you store most of your files on a third drive shared between the operating systems… you could call that partition "Data".

nice tut.