Vista Dual Boot with Windows XP …

Microsoft recently release its Windows Vista. For those who had used VISTA, it had been a very nice experience because of its nice interface and stuffs (of course, the price you have to pay is high end PCs and graphics card). I recently tried the Vista on my ASUS laptop and really liked the way Vista displays. However, when it comes to gaming, oh boy, this monster, must have taken too muc video memory .. so much so that my 2 GHZ Core 2 Duo processor with 1 GB RAM cannot even play a decent game. As such, I decided, enough is enough. I am keeping my Windows VISTA.. but I am also dual booting it to Windows XP (for Gaming).

Initially, I thought its was a piece of cake, just like XP dual booting with Windows 2000. However, I was wrong. After my machine was installed with Windows Vista, I wasn’t given a choice to install XP when I insert my XP cd rom. WTF !! Then when I installed my XP from startup, it totally removed my ability to boot up from Vista. Instead, it boot me up using Windows XP. To add to my agony, the Vista I had from ASUS is preloaded and therefore, the Recovery disk that they provided wasn’t of much help because it wouldn’t allow me to repair my boot records. Instead, it reinstalled the entire Vista for me and I was once again able to boot into Vista but not my Windows XP. How did I solve this, follow the steps in my next paragraph. For those holding on to Vista recovery disk from Vendor, you can try what I tried. For those who actually had a Vista Installation disk, I think you can install XP first, then Install Vista and they will prompt if you wanna upgrade. Click on the NO button and you should be fine. So the steps for those Vendor provided disks are as follows:

1. Download the freeware called EasyBCD. Go search Google and you should be able to get it easily.
2. Make sure you have 2 partitions. C and D.
3. You will have to wipe out your existing Vista data, so hope you aren’t too deep into using Vista Yet.
4. Install Windows XP from startup into the second partition (i.e. D) and follow the usual way of installation.
5. After installation, you shouldn’t be able to boot up into Vista but should be able to boot up into XP.
6. Boot up into XP, and copy the following files from C:\. They are boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com. These files are usually hidden and you will have to uncheck the hide system files option in folder options.
7. Next, put in the vendor recovery disk and recovery the vista (which originally should be in C driver, the 1st partition).
8. After recovery, you should be able to boot into Vista but not into XP.
9. After Vista had been installed, install the EasyBCD.
10. Use the EasyBCD to add another boot OS into the record. The program is very straight forward (for IT Savvy People), therefore, need not much explanation. Basically, you will be prompted of the drive the XP OS is in, what type of OS and thats it. Very simple.
11. Copy the files boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com into C:\
12. Reboot the machine and you will be prompted to bootup using either Vista or XP. That’s it !! Its that simple !! Heeeeeeee