I have dual booted in the past, but I appear a bit rusty. I apologize if this has been covered, or if this post is wordy, but I prefer that you guys know what I have tried already.

I have a new Acer M1640 Desktop with Vista Premium preinstalled. The PC has a 250 GB SATA Drive factory partitioned as:

10 GB - EISA Config
111 GB - Vista Partition
111 GB - Remaining Health Primary Partition (Free Space)

No matter what I do I can not (can't) boot to the XP CD. I have tried:

1) Pressing F12 and selecting "Boot to DVD-CD"
2) Tweaking bios to boot to DVD-CD
3) Removed the hard drive from the boot options in Bios and left only DVD-CD (Just to see if I could force the boot to DVD)
4) As a last resort I hooked up a 120 GB Maxtor IDE and then removed the SATA drive from the equation, but I still could not boot to the CD. (knowing that's ill advised)

I found a user that posted a nice guide on the Acer M1640. It slipstreamed the SATA drivers to the XP install CD but that didn't do the trick either.

I can't post links cos I'm a newb here but her guide is at nonoh dot com

She did indicate that she formatted her drive first. I would prefer to dual boot, so I do not care to reformat. I referred to the guide at:

pronetworks Topic 88231 "Install Windows XP in a Dual Boot with Pre-installed Windows Vista "

It instructs to:

1) "Prepare a Partition" which I appear to already have in the 2nd 111 GB partition.
2) "install Windows XP in the normal manner." which of course I can not do because I can not boot to the XP CD.
3) "Create a Vista Dual Boot Menu"...

Am I missing something here guys? Do I need to edit the bootloader in order to boot to the XP CD?

I have never used Gparted, but I have been considering using it to wipe the Vista partition, but like I said I prefer to dual boot XP & Vista. But if it comes to it I will wipe the Vista, because I must have XP top run critical Apps.

Thanks in advance for your patience and support.

Jack

Have you tried to boot from another disc other than XP?

NT50 wrote:

Have you tried to boot from another disc other than XP?

Yes,I forgot to mention I tried to boot to Darik's Boot and Nuke (dban) as well as Ultimate Boot CD and I can not boot to either. I can however boot to my Acer System & Restore Disk, so I know my DVD Drive is working & bootable. Weirdest thing really. I can really use some help here guys. Thanks again.

Contact Acer and ask them why.....................

I like to know that myself...................

interesting...
when trying to boot from cd is there any activity on the cd read/write light?

does the M1640 have the dual layer dvd rw? maybe it doesn't like you older cds. do you have another cd drive you can try?

Just wondering, have you been able to boot those disks on other systems? Just wanting to eliminate the factor that maybe they were created incorrectly.

Yes it is a dual layer DVD\CD
Yes the light on the DVD-CD blinks briefly but it does not boot from the disk
Yes the XP CD does boot on other PCs
No Acer was no help at all

I was able to boot to gparted, but stopped shy of wipping the vista partition. I guess I am not even convinced that would solve the problem. I am stumped. I'm still trying to sort this out, so any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks Jack

I would try a different cd drive.

maybe you could boot to USB then run from the CD?