Dual boot vista winxp

The company that developed the application may no longer be around or the cost to upgrade is too high. In my case, I have a lot of classic PC games that will not run at all under Windows Vista no matter how I configure the compatibility options. In order to play my old games I need to install Windows XP. However, I am not exactly ready to give up all of the advances in Windows Vista just so that I can play my old games once in a while.

The answer is to dual boot Windows Vista and XP. Dual booting Windows XP and Vista on the same computer will allow you to select from a boot menu what operating sytem you want to run.

This menu is shown right after you power on your computer. Setting up both Windows XP and Vista on one computer can be a little ticky depending what operating system you have installed first. The next two sections will help you configure both versions on your computer, depending on what OS you have installed first:. If you want to dual boot XP and Vista and XP is already installed on your computer you will not have to do much work to dual boot vista.

Windows 7 has proved to be quite the drastic improvement over Vista, enough that it even has XP stragglers crawling out of the woodwork to check it out. The final version of Windows 7 has already been sent to partners and is scheduled to debut publicly later this week on October Thankfully, setting up a dual boot configuration is both easy and practical.

If the former is true, feel free to skip ahead to Step 2. To create a Windows 7 disc, pop a blank DVD into your burner, and burn it as an image file with any of the countless apps that can handle ISOs. Moving on to more pressing matters, we will need to create unallocated disk space by resizing an existing partition in your current hard drive, and then create a new partition on that free space for Windows 7 to run on. Thankfully, getting XP into the boot menu is not particularly difficult.

Thus, a copy of ntldr must be installed on the Vista partition. Open My Computer. Select "Show hidden files and folders" and uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" and "Hide protected operating system files recommended ".

Click OK. Open drive D the partition on which you installed Windows XP. Copy the files "ntldr", "ntdetect. Open drive C and drag the files in. Note that a UAC dialog may pop up asking for confirmation. Click Start and type cmd. Right-click on cmd. Type the following:. Now that you have Windows XP and Vista installed on the same computer, you may install drivers and software. Remember to activate your copies of Windows within 30 days; before you activate, however, make sure that Windows runs correctly, and that everything is set up the way you want it.

Method 2: XP installed first This is the method I tried after I figured out that the other one didn't work for me. What I needed I faced a dilemma. Preparation Assumptions: In this tutorial, it is assumed that you have a single hard disk in your computer, and your computer meets Windows Vista's system requirements.

Planning your disk configuration The first thing to do when preparing a dual-boot is to plan how you will configure your hard drive. I have partitioned the disk as illustrated below: Partitioning the disk I happened to have a second installation of Windows XP on a separate hard drive, and I thus used Windows XP's diskmgmt. Installing Windows Vista Before we can actually install Vista, there is an important thing we must do, viz. Type the following: diskpart select disk 0 select partition 1 active Close the command prompt and click Next.

Proceed with the Vista installation as usual. Adding XP back into Vista's boot menu Now that you have Vista installed and working, you may have noticed that there is no way to get into XP.

Conclusion Now that you have Windows XP and Vista installed on the same computer, you may install drivers and software. Comments 5 Skip to comment form. I followed this tutorial with Windows 7 instead of Vista and this worked flawlessly! Create two partitions, C and D. Install XP on D. I remember from previous experiences that XP still called its drive C even though it is technically D. First of all, drive letters are defined within the context of an operating system not the BIOS.

Therefore, the idea of XP "calling its drive C even though it is technically D" isn't entirely correct. Second, XP always calls the active partition on the first hard drive "C:" in the installer stage. It doesn't matter what size the partitions are. Of course, if neither partition is marked as active, it might choose based on the size or order of partitions Third, the main point of this tutorial was the separation of both systems.

Even if you successfully install XP on C: and Vista on "D:" the Vista installer still calls the active partition "C:" but renames the system partition to C: even if it was different in the installer window , it would work perfectly, EXCEPT for the fact that Vista's boot files will be on the active partition in this case, the one XP is on.

This would prevent you from just deleting the XP partition, and would give you issues if you're trying to boot from GRUB for example.