[watsonaka]

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

[NT50]

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

[watsonaka]

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.

[NT50]

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

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

[_Taz_]

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?

[ar1stotle]

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.

[watsonaka]

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

[_Taz_]

I would try a different cd drive.

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