Hello Paul,
The below well-informed previously Posted response (by jimmuh) might not be
exactly what you are seeking... although, might provide you with a new
perspective for your desired outcome.
There has been many previous inquires very similar as you request, so, you
might consider performing a word / Topic Search in the Field: Search For:
Good luck regarding your efforts.
Respectfully,
As I said, I am sorry to throw cold water, but I think dual booting Vista
with WinXP is a real PIA. If you have a definite reason for needing both
operating systems, and you need both of them to boot from the same system,
then dual booting MIGHT be worth the hassle. I would imagine that most people
would be dual booting Vista with WinXP so that they could continue to use
WinXP as their main OS while
examining Vista to see how it behaves. But if you're not careful about
protecting the Vista partiton from WinXP's overzealous System Restore
behavior, then you won't be seeing Vista in its normal state. You'll be
seeing a crippled Vista without its Previous Version features, and so on.
That's why I suggested separate systems. (I meant totally separate
computers, not separate hard drives, which would do nothing at all to protect
Vista from WinXP.) Another possibility would be using either Vista or WinXP
as the host operating system, installing a virtual machine environment
(VMWare, VPC, etc.) and installing the other OS on a virtual machine. I'm
thinking that, with these operating systems, 1 gigabyte is a little slim on
memory. I do some VPC and Virtual Server stuff with a fast notebook with two
60 gigabyte hard drives and 2 gigs of memory, and I wouldn't want to be using
anything slower. If you try this put the test OS on the virtual machine. It's
going to be the slow one. Also be prepared for a bit of a learning curve with
respect to dealing with virtual machines, if you haven't done that before. If
you're just looking at a test OS in isolation, then there's not much to do
besides install it and use it on the VM. If you're trying to do anything like
networking, then there can be a little more to it.
There are a lot of sites out there with information on dual booting. Unless
you're looking at a site that has been updated intelligently to cover the
hassles between WinXP and Vista then you're getting just enough information
to get you into trouble. As I said, Vista is pretty well-behaved with respect
to being nice to other operating systems when it gets installed. But WinXP
does the nasty to Vista's restore points and shadow copy data. I found this
out the hard way in the early days. And there still seem to be quite a few
folks who are unaware of this. For better or for worse, the System Restore
functionality in Vista has been extended to include the ability to keep
previous versions of data files available for a while -- kind of like an
extended Recycle Bin. It's an important feature of Vista and should be seen
working properly rather than crippled when you're testing the OS.
Lots of subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the OS that require, I
think, an adjustment in thinking if one is to make the best -- and safest --
use of them.
