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)

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Sometime i just miss posts or there are just too many to know which have been solved and which have not.

ive done this so far but in my confusion i have an unallocated partition, how do i delete this?

I dont know why or what happened but the partition I made using this tutorial wasn't in the list of partitions in the OS setup screen so i just canceled out of it and now my computer wont boot to vista. D: It gets as far as a black screen with a blinking white cursor. ****. Someone HELP! I CANNOT LOSE ALL MY DATA ON THAT COMPUTER D:!!!


please email me ASAP IF YOU CAN HELP! [email protected]

Hi there!
Very good tutorial indeed. Nonetheless, I was not able to fully install XP Pro SP2 secondly to a Vista Ultimate x64 machine. I used a perfect original XP CD that began installation by partitioning and formatting the HD (in which I have installed the Vista x64) an then installed the XP files like a dream. However, when it reboots, the computer halts by the message "press any key to install from CD/DVD". Some funny colored ASCI characters also appears on screen (somewhat like a virus, though none was detected thru my previous scanning with both NOD32 and Norton). Any guess (and/or troubleshooting)? Thanks anyway.

you do not wish to delete it, but rather have a partition "absorb" it. choose teh last partition closest to it, and grow or expand the partition. Terminology will differ depending on the application you use.
If given an option to select where to take the memory from, choose the unallocated memory. This will add the memory to a partition which already exists.

First of all, do not swear on the forums. This is likely to get you very little help.
--> I will help you anyway.

there is no worry of losing your data, worst case scenario you can place your drive in another computer to save the data.

Are you using Sata drives, or an xp disc without SP2?

Also to get your vista working again, following the options listed with fixmbr and fixboot should work just fine.

It sounds as if the installation did not finish, at least according to the MBR...
I have not attempted this with 64bit versions, I suppose this could be an issue, but i don't see why.

Is your XP 64 bit as well?

I was able to make an unallocated partition of 5.27 G on my drive, but when I attempted to use the Simple Volume Wizard to convert it to my XP NTFS partition, it gave me the message "Not enough space on disk". Admittedly, the initial screen with G ranges showed more space than the partition graphics did, but I reduced the maximum part of the range to a lower figure with no effect. Any ideas?
Phil

is the vista installation disc mentioned in the tutorial the same as the Vista recovery disc? or is it a completely different CD/DVD?

Hi William,

Thanks for all of the insight here!

However, I have gone through everything on this site and tried the various options to no avail. I am still unable to get past the no disk detected error using the Win XP Pro w/SP2 bootable CD. The computer I am using is a Gateway notebook MX8734 bought 07/2007. Any ideas on how to proceed?

cesander