Dual Boot Vista and XP with Vista already installed

If you want to install Vista onto an XP computer, try the reverse tutorial: (XP already installed)
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-William. § (marvin_gohan)

easyBCD is a good tool. I am just a stickler for not having 3rd party software running my OS if possible :P
Glad your dual boot is working fine.

Hey I am brand new here and I came accross this post. I recently installed XP on my HP laptop that had Vista installed. I followed these directions almost exactly. But now I cannot boot up vista. It defaults to XP and I don't know how to tell it to boot to vista. Any help would be excellent I can't use my laptop without vista.

i have been thure this and thure this and not seeing the anser to my problem i suspect it is something with acer

what is hapeing is i go thure the steps but in page 3 i cant put in the install disk for vista because i dont have one all i have is a recovery disk that will wipe it and reinstall vista i managed to get back into vista by just reinstalling it and i did get it to show the boot loader screen with xp and vista but when i click xp it goes to the missing ntldr error and i have reinstaled it 3 times and can even see it listed there im shure its something simple i am missing but its getting to be frustrating as i am shure it is for you to keep seeing the same quistions im just wondering if there is something you might be able to think of

EasyBCD will clean things up for you. Go to message 244.

Hi William... I got a problem when I finished with the New Simple Volume Wizard, I followed all the steps rigthly but when I click finish it appears me a little message that says that there is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation. I don't know why that happens, I hope you can help me with this problem, thank you for taking your time to read this.

ok i have a acer aspire 5520 and as you can see in my above post i had some trouble i managed to get mine fixed here is what i had to do it still has a small problem i can live with but i plan to redo all the processes and clean it up ill repost that when i do i am still haveng a problem with a modem driver

ok i followed the steps here but with acer laptops you dont get a dvd you have to make your own and it dont give you any options it just formats and reinstalls vista so what i had to do was (mine had 2 partions factory) start the xp install like you would from a fresh start and when it got to the directory to where you install i had to delet the d partion and let xp make a new one then install load into xp after it installs then put in my dvd that i made from inside vista with the recovery program and restart and boot to the dvd and let vista reinstall(if you are not willing to lose ever thing you have dont do this) here is where i run into my trouble i had to uses easybcd i plan to redo the process and use williams process to see if i can fix the problems i had but any way when i rebooted i got the missing ntldr error i added them and got a missing hal.dll error to fix that i had to boot to the xp cd and chose repair windows and then type in bootcfg /list enter(dont realy think you have to do this but it was in the instructions i got so i did it )then bootcfg /rebuild hit enter then save it it asked me for some other stuff i wasent shure what it was so i put in xp and vista so when i rebooted and picked xp it had a second list wanting xp and vista i hit xp and it loaded to windows i know this is not a very good post but i will try to fill in the info as soon as i can get my modem drivers fixed

if any one has found a working cnx driver for a aspire 5520 in xp i would realy like the link i have tryed about 10 and none of them work i did see on a hp driver page that there cnx needs xp sp3 to work and im on dile up so i cant download sp 2 or 3any way i hope this post helps some one

Did you use the vista disc to install it's boot loader? The default behavior after this step is to only have Vista, thus you add XP to it.

What is the partition setup of your drive? Installing Vista after XP is considerably easier as Vista can detect that XP exists. I have been busier than I could have even imagined lately, and I am trying to solve this issue, but using copyrighted files makes it difficult.

The MS partition shrinking software is not perfect, but I found this which has links to resources and tips on making it work.
Working Around Windows Vista's "Shrink Volume" Inadequacy Problems :: the How-To Geek

there is a hidden partion for the system install for when it becoms nescary to format and reinstall its 10 gig then it has a acer c: (vista)90 gig xp d: (xp) 30 gig and the remander is data e:58.3 gig


my entire problem is with the dvd that i made from the vista os doesent give any options if you boot to it.it just formats and reinstalls vista to the c drive so i couldnt do the step where you boot to the vista cd and repaire the vista bootloader i managed to get my system to boot into xp and vista but acer doesnt seem to have a working modem driver for xp