Moving XP to a partition on a Vista HDD

[Guest]

I have a small hard drive with XP installed and a new larger drive with Vista
installed. Both are bootable on their own when set as the first drive. Both
were installed in this PC. The XP however goes through a "phantom" Vista boot
menu – that older Vista is no longer there and XP is in the only partition.
Now, I would like to move XP to a partition at the end of the larger drive,
and I need to be able to boot to it too – preferably from Vista's boot menu,
but other methods, like using a CD/floppy when needing XP would be ok too. I
just don't want it to cause any trouble when installing Vista's SP1 or
something. I would rarely need XP.
I should probably manage creating the partition and cloning to it, but how
can I make XP bootable then without harming Vista? Is there way adding XP to
Vista's boot menu?
Also, is there a partition cloning software that can copy to a smaller
partition (the larger is half empty)?

Thanks in advance for any of your thoughts!

 

[Guest]

I have now removed the older Vista menu from the XP drive, so now there are
just plain bootable XP drive + plain bootable Vista drive. How can now I add
the XP to as a bootable partition?

 

[peter]

"I would rarely need XP.
This line in your question makes me think that you should stay with the 2 OS
on seperate HD and use the BIOS to chose which HD/OS to boot into.
Its the easiest to setup....its the easiest to undo..............
peter

 

[Guest]

yeah, but the old drive stated getting bad sectors...

 

[John Barnes]

You can then install XP fresh on the new drive, with proper precautions or
your best bet would be to buy a new drive and clone the system onto it.
Cloning to the other drive can be done, but remember that an XP installation
has many registry entries that will get confused when it has its drive
location changed. If it is cloned to a new drive, make sure the first time
it is booted it is in the exact position as the drive cloned from. i.e. swap
drives exactly. If you do decide to do a fresh install to the new drive,
post back and I will provide some guidance so you don't overwrite the Vista
boot.