Dual Booting windows xp and vista

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kgirl20653

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#16756 26-Oct-2007 11:58

I bought a Compaq Presario C571NR Notebook about 2 mths ago. It came pre-installed with Vista. Which I hate, but besides that, I take online classes, one of which all of my assignments are based on Windows XP. I obtained a copy of Window's XP from my school, and I went to a website calleed howtogeek, and got instructions to dual boot vista and xp. But when after I partitioned my drive, and put in the disk, I got an error message basically saying the disk won't run b/c of compatibility issues. Is there anyway to get around this and be able run XP. I only have a week to keep the disk, then it has to be returned.

freitasm

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#92519 26-Oct-2007 12:19

It looks like Windows Vista is trying to run the setup program when you insert the disc. You should try booting from this disc.

Make sure you have a second partition already and when asked where to install make sure you don't override the Windows Vista partition.

Now the problem is that Windows Vista uses a different boot manager, and Windows XP doesn't know about it. So you shouldn't install Windows XP after Windows Vista - but the other way around.

kinsten

240 posts

Master Geek

#92557 26-Oct-2007 15:45

You could always download and install MS VPC 2007, then install XP onto that.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

Should have all the info you need there. Then you just open XP up when you need it, within Vista. =)

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signz

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Master Geek

#92584 26-Oct-2007 17:39

I'm with Kinsten ...

Either Virtual PC or VMware may be a better solution that a dual boot. I run many, many virtual machines and the ability to start, stop, copy, backup etc makes life a lot easier - particularly if you are testing various configurations etc.

I use VMware for historical and management reasons but MS VPC is equaliy (if not more) capable if you only need Windows support.

DS