Dual Boot Vista and XP with Vista already installed

I have to make the assumption that the version of Vista most are using is 32-bit. I just bought an HP 9700 laptop with Vista Home Premium 64-bit pre-installed but I was able to get HP to send original recovery disk as the recovery program would not work. I have used them twice trying to get this thing to dual boot. I have been trying for six days now. Have been all over the web and tried everything. Not happening! I have a full version of XP PRO that I am trying to load. I have 3 primary partitions using different software. At step 3 XP says it can not find any drivers for the hard drive and terminates the instulation. The closest I get to XP seeing a partition is when I plug in a 4gb thumb drive, in fact I loaded XP to it just to make sure the disc was not corrupt. I have even gone into the BIOS to reconfigure the boot sequence. No luck. I sure could use some professional help !