How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first)
Got a Vista PC and want to install XP so you can dual-boot between them? Here’s how to do it, in an easy, step-by-step format.
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. (Some time 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.)
Anyone who has tried re-partitioning hard disk knows what a painfull job it is; if you don’t utilize any third party tool, you have no other option but to delete existing partition such as C: or D: to create the new ones, resulting in re-installing everything from the scratch. With Windows Vista, this has changed a little; you don’t really have to buy third party tools to be able to accomplish that. You can use the “Shrink” feature in Disk Management which will allow you to shrink an existing partition or volume to create unallocated disk space, from which you can create a new partition or volume. Here are the steps on how to do that:
Shrink a Volume
- Right-click Computer in the Start Menu and then select Manage.
- Click on Disk Management under Storage in the left column of the Computer Management window.
- Right-click the volume you want to shrink and then select Shrink Volume.
- Enter the amount of space (in MB) you want to shrink the volume by in the Shrink window. Make sure you leave extra space, especially on the C: (or system) drive.
Note: 1024MB is equal to 1GB.
- Click Shrink to start the shrinking process.
- When it’s done you’ll have a bunch of unallocated space to work with.
Install Windows XP
When the Windows XP setup reaches the point where you’re prompted where it is to be installed, you’ll see that while XP can see the space we created earlier, it can also see the partition with Vista on it.
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 won’t be C:.
From XP’s perspective this isn’t really a problem – it’s smart enough to figure out where everything should go – but some applications make assumptions about where they should install to, and can’t 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 couldn’t 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 – there’s no need to do anything differently.
When the system reboots it won’t bring up a boot menu. Although XP recognises the Vista partition it doesn’t 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 you’ll 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 Vista’s 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 isn’t such a great situation.
Restoring Vista and dual booting
Because you can’t use the Windows XP bootloader to boot Vista, we have to reinstate Vista’s bootloader to the MBR and configure it to manage both operating systems.
Boot from the Vista DVD and on the screen where you’re prompted to “Install now”, select “Repair your computer”.
The next screen searches for local Vista installations – there should only be one, so click Next.
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.
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).
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.
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”.
Reboot the system and you’ll have two entries in the Vista bootloader, and can boot into either operating system.
