Dual boot with windows XP Pro 64 Bit and Vista Ultimate 32 Bit

[Lee Steele]

I have a Dell Inspriron E1705 Desktop running Intel Duo 2 Core T2500 at
@2.00 GHz with 2 Gig of memory. The hard drive is 91.75 GB. When it came
from Dell, it had a 47 MB EISA Configured partition for Dells' diagnostic
tools, a 4.93 GB Primary partition with Dells disk restoration program and
the remaining 86.5 GB was in a primary partition. I spilt the primary
partition into a 39. GB Primary partition for Windows XP PRO Media Center
2005 and a 47.5 GB logical partition onto which I installed Windows Vista
Ultimate RC2.

I am quite happy with the way Vista Ultimate performs on the laptop. I did
not think to download the 64 bit version when it was available, so I've
downloaded the trial version of Windows XP Pro 64 Bit and would like to
install it on the partition that currently holds XP Pro Media Center,
replacing Media Center with XP Pro 64 bit. I want to see how a 64 bit OS
works on the laptop before Vista becomes available to the public.

If I format the 39 GB primary partition which holds Media Center to install
XP 64 Bit, will I loose the capability to boot into Vista on the logical
partition? From what I've read on these news groups, I can not "upgrade" to
XP 64 Bit, but must do a clean install.

If I do loose the ability to boot to Vista after the format of the primary
partition, can I do a repair using the RC2 DVD to restore the boot files?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Lee Steele

 

[Aaron Kelley]

I believe you will lose the ability to boot Vista, but the DVD will fix it.
I did something similar to this myself... To fix the Vista boot, I just had
to boot the DVD and click the "Repair your computer" (or similar) option at
the first screen once it's booted. It then did some quick checking and told
me that my boot was messed up and offered to fix it, and once it did,
everything worked fine.

- Aaron

 

[Charlie Russel - MVP]

You will lose the Vista boot option. You can then fix that. See my blog for
details of how I did it.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64/ar...-Boot-Problems-with-XP-x64-and-Vista-x64.aspx