By default Vista takes over the C: drive on install, this is regardless of
whether you do a clean install or not, Vista claims the C: drive letter. If
you dual boot, and say you boot to XP, this will still come up as the C:
drive, but if you boot to Vista it will display as D or E:
In your situation i would start afresh by reformatting and then
re-installing XP to the C: drive, creating a separate partition for Vista
and then installing Vista to the new partition.
The biggest problem prior to reformatting is finding out what type of XP
installation is on your PC. If you have a retail copy of the XP installation
CD then you can easily reformat the hard drive using this disk. Just visit
my website
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org Click the Win XP Faq button and
take a look at question 7 'how do i reformat my hard drive with XP'
If you have a recovery disk then you will have to install over the original
XP partition. You should be aware that most recovery disks allocate 'all' of
your hard drive for installing Windows XP, therefore, to be able to install
Vista you will need to buy third party partitioning software, such as
Partition Magic, Paragon Drive manager or something similar. This will
enable you to shrink the original XP partition to allow free space for a new
partition.
The same is going to be true if your backup copy of XP is on a hidden
partition on your hard drive. The PC user manual should give you this
information, anyway.
If, on the other hand, you have 'imaged' your hard drive using Norton Ghost
or something similar you can actually copy the 'umage' over the original XP
image on your drive and work from there to create another partition.
If you don't have an imaged copy of yuor hard drive (one that 'you' created
not the manufacturer) you are going to have to update XP and installed all
the software that was on the original copy of XP all over again.
--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org
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