James Bannan18 October 2006, 8:44 AM
If you're not quite willing to let go of XP yet in favour of an unstable pre-release version of Vista (whatever could possibly be the problem?) dual-booting Vista and XP is the smart move. Here's how to do it.
PLEASE NOTE -- there is a newer version of this tutorial available. Click here to go to it .
If one installation of Windows just isn’t enough, or you don’t feel like there’s enough pain in your life yet, why not install both Windows XP and Windows Vista onto the same machine?
Why not indeed. To be honest, I have no idea why you’d want to do this. As mentioned in a previous blog entry, Vista’s dominance of the MBR makes the process something of a one-way street. Once Vista is introduced to any system you have to play ball according to Vista Rules.
Partitioning
The actual dual-booting process is, however, relatively painless and straightforward. On a machine with Windows XP installed, the only prerequisite is that the hard drive has enough space to accommodate a Vista installation, or that you have a second drive to drop Vista onto.
If you only have one physical drive, then you’ll need some spare space on the disk for a Vista partition. This can be a drama if your XP partition takes up the entire disk, as you’ll need to resize it. Unfortunately XP won’t help you here. If you have a drive partitioning tool like Acronis, well and good. But if you don’t and you’d (understandably) rather not pay for it if you don't have to, there are alternatives.
Windows Vista CAN resize partitions on the fly, but unfortunately it won’t do it as part of the default Vista installation. However, if you can get your hands on Windows PE 2.0, then you’re in business.
Boot into PE, and load DISKPART from x:\Windows\System32. This is the Vista version of DISKPART, so the SHRINK option is available. Select the appropriate volume first (usually SELECT VOLUME 0) and type in SHRINK. This isn’t a configurable process as it is via Disk Management in the Vista GUI. SHRINK just goes through and recovers what space it can. On a 20GB NTFS partition with a basic XP installation, SHRINK dropped the partition by 10GB, which is enough for Vista (just!). It's likely that defragmenting free space on the partition you're shrinking will help a lot.
If you don’t have access to Windows PE 2.0, there’s a very powerful tool called GParted - the GNOME Partition Editor. This is a Linux-based GUI partitioning tool which can resize NTFS partitions (amongst LOTS of others).
Grab the LiveCD download, burn the ISO to create a bootable CD and fire up the machine. Accepting all the defaults should work fine, except if you’re using VMWare, in which case load the graphics modules manually and select VESA, otherwise the screen will just go black. Right-click on the partition and select Resize/Move. Drag the edge of the partition until you get the size needed, select OK and then Apply. And that’s it! Reboot and install Vista into the newly-created partition.
Boot Manager
Once Vista is installed, the system brings up the Windows Boot Manager (Vista version), with a choice between “Microsoft Windows Vista” or a bland and generic “Earlier Version of Windows”.
Bit boring, but unfortunately modifying the boot manager in Vista is not quite as easy as it has been in the past. You can still access boot information in System Properties (right-click My Computer, Properties, Advanced System Settings), then Startup and Recovery, Settings. Here you can select the default operating system to load and the selection timeout settings, but that’s it. To edit all the boot options, you have to use a new tool called BCDEDIT from the command line. And unfortunately, it’s not easy to use at all. Very comprehensive and powerful, but difficult.
BUT - running to the rescue is EasyBCD from NeoSmart. This gives you a GUI for BCDEDIT and makes life SO much easier. There’s a swag of options you can choose depending on how in-depth you want to get. For the moment, just go to “Configure Boot” and change the name of the Windows XP installation to “Windows XP” and hit “Save Settings”. Restart and you’ll see that the changes have been written to the boot manager, and life is slightly less bland that it was.
Under “Add/Remove Entries” you can move existing entries up and down the list, or add new ones, if you have an existing partition ready for the new operating system. In theory, you could use Vista to quad-boot XP, Vista, Linux and OSX. But you’d be very brave…or a tech writer.
If you decide that dualbooting really isn’t for you after all, the Vista MBR needs to go if you want to get XP operational again. Luckily, EasyBCD can help. Go to “Manage Bootloader” and select “Uninstall the Vista Bootloader” then “Write MBR”. Restart the machine and the Vista Boot Manager is gone - the system loads straight into Windows XP. And in XP, the Vista partition is now the secondary D: partition, which can be safely erased.
