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[bobseptic Profile]

I know this has been covered several times but heres my situation:

I am using vista 64 on my main c: drive and i have no other os's there. Before i installed vista i did a norton ghost of my xp which from time to time i put back onto my c: drive.

I use the vista install dvd to restore to my vista complete backup which is on my second hard drive.

How do i go about dual booting ?


1: i have vista 64 complete pc backup on second drive
2: i have northon ghost image of windows xp on my second drive
3: i also have windows xp install cd with my serial

Can i install xp along with my current vista install without doing vista any damage ?

thanks for looking

[kd1966 Profile YIM]

You may be able to get this to work, BUT remember this - when you imaged you XP, the boot.ini tells where the HDD/partition was located, and this USUALLY does not work well if you recover your image to a different partition/HDD (Logically speaking) You may need to re-edit the boot.ini, but that may only allow you to boot into XP (If that)

Let's start off by taking a look at your Disk Mgmt console from Vista (Screenshot needed please)

[bobseptic Profile]

[kd1966 Profile YIM]

Interesting......... so basically you take your XP image and put it where Vista x64 currently is?

The problem, if you've read some recent threads here, is when using imaging and placing the imaged OS in a different "location" (Logically speaking) or partition than where it was during the imaging process, is that when you go to boot the system next time that it will NOT properly boot, as the boot.ini file points to where the OS "WAS" and not where it currently resides. That and now you will have TWO partitions saying they are the "System" drive.

Here's what you can try: Through x64 Vista, recover the image to where you have some room (Possibly that 64GB of unused space on Disk 0), then edit the Boot.ini file on the XP partition to properly point to the XP partition, THEN do a command prompt from Vista and run VistaBootPRO 3.1 and UNINSTALL the Vista bootloader........... then put your XP CD in the drive and reboot to the XP CD Recovery Console; you'll need to pay attention to which OS you log into here, then type the command: fixboot (Once you do this you should 'exit' and reboot back to XP (Hopefully since you've edited the boot.ini to point to the proper XP location this will take to directly to XP)

Now that (HopefullY) you are in XP, and the XP partition should now be the ONLY "System" drive, install and run VistaBootPRO 3.1 and REINSTALL the Vista bootloader.

I know this sounds quite drawn out, but when using premade images and recovering them to different locations, the process to dual booting XP and Vista can be very meticulous