Dual Boot Vista/XP

by **kingpin393** » Wed Mar 07, 2007 4:50 pm

Hi, I am an avid computer user but i am really new to vista and SATA.

Ok, this is what I have:

An HP pavillion PC with a 320gig SATA HD. I have Vista home premium installed on it. Since it is and HP i don't have the Vista DVD, only my restore DVDs.

This is what I want to do:

I have a 80gig IDE HD from an old computer. I want to install it and put windows XP on it. Then have a boot menu to choose which OS boots.

My questions:

Is this even possible?
If so, how do i go about doing it?
- what pin setting should my IDE drive be? master or slave?
- i don't want to have to reinstall Vista if it can be avoided.

Any help would be appreciated.

Kevin

by **augie** » Wed Mar 07, 2007 5:06 pm

Hi and welcome aboard kingpin393. I deleted your other post as only one is needed and we see them all.

Someone will be by soon to help you.

by **kd1966** » Wed Mar 07, 2007 6:23 pm

Hi kingpin393, since you don't have the Vista install DVD, you may want to contact HP and tell them you need it, as there will be times you DON'T want to destroy all your data trying to recover.
OK, seeing as your SATA is the main drive and has Vista installed on it, this is your SYSTEM drive; now if you add an IDE HDD, you FIRST need to go into BIOS and make sure the IDE HDD DOES NOT boot first; set it to boot after your SATA HDD............ Then you should be able to boot the XP CD and install to the IDE drive - this will temporarily kill your ability to boot Vista, as NOW the XP IDE partition will be the System drive. Once in XP, you can download/install/run VistaBootPRO 3.1, run the diagnostics, then REINSTALL the Vista Bootloader. Enjoy the site!

by **kingpin393** » Wed Mar 07, 2007 6:32 pm

Awsome, thanks a bunch! I will try that out when i get home from work and let you know how it works out.

Great site by the way!

-Kevin

by **kingpin393** » Wed Mar 07, 2007 11:21 pm

I decided to just partition the SATA drive instead. I followed Gravity's instructions to create the partition but when I rebooted with the windows xp cd in the drive it loaded into windows xp setup fine but I only see 1 partition in there - the C:\. I am given the option to install on that or delete it. What do I do?

by **NT50** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:06 am

Use Vista to not only partition/shrink the drive but go ahead and format the drive and assign a drive letter to it also. Then try booting to XP and see what happens.

by **kingpin393** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:14 am

yeah, i did that, drive E:\ is the one i want to install xp on

i read in another post something about xp pre-sp2 not having the sata drivers on the install cd, could that be my problem?

by **NT50** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:21 am

correct... if you have XP SP1 or earlier then it does not have the sata drivers on it. you will need to d/l them and press F6 to install additional drivers

by **kingpin393** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:23 am

where can i get them? are there generic ones or do i have to get them from HP?

by **NT50** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:28 am

Some say they have found some drivers for some older model of HP computers that actually worked. I would contact HP just to see what they say.

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Dual Boot Vista/XP

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