Replies

Everyone, thanks!

I have successfully installed XP PRO SP3 as a dual-boot option on my existing VISTA Home Premium SP2 HP desktop.

This is what I went through, based on a couple articles I found online:

There are two physical drives on the HP; Vista is on drive 0 and runs as C:. On the second drive, D: drive 1, I created a partition with Vista’s DISK MANAGER for the XP installation. The computer sees this partition as E:

Because the HP oem disk failed to recreate the Vista boot manager (as it was supposed to do) and the manual attempt also failed, I used neosmart’s compilation .iso “restore boot manager” which successfully repaired the VISTA boot manager. I then ran EasyBCD which easily configured the boot manager to give me the option of XP or Vista upon bootup (with Vista defaulting after 10 seconds).

One problem was, I underestimated the space allowance for the XP OS; 4 GB was too little. I installed the OS using my XP SP2 disk, and then updated to SP3 using the Microsoft network IT .iso from a CD. Microsoft Update then needed to download 108 updates (including such things as Windows Media Player 11, which I wanted) and maxed out the space before finishing the updates (it needed lots of space for .Net Framework version 4). The Disk Manager in VISTA will not expand an “active” boot partition; however, thankfully, the free PARTITION WIZARD will, so I was able to double the size of the partition without any problem.

The programs that I want to run under XP are installed on the C: drive; I created a c:programs (86)xp folder, and put the XP programs into it. They seem to work fine so far, and it prevents maxing out the XP partition again.

At this moment, everything seems to be working fine. When I turn on the computer, I get to choose between XP and Vista. Each boots just fine when selected, and everything seems to work properly under its own system.