Bacchus451

Regardless of what you think of Windows Vista, it's pretty clear that everyone is curious about it. The thing is, no one wants to sacrifice their trusty XP only to have Vista dissapoint. The solution is setting up a seperate partition and allowing yourself to boot into either XP -or- Vista, and it's not as complicated as some people make it out to be.

First we'll start by assuming that currently you have Windows XP set as your primary OS and are looking to clean install Vista.

#1 thing to remember: Vista will only boot from a primary partition!

Many people found this out the hard way, but it's true. Vista is very self-serving and refuses to be second-rate. In any case, the first thing that needs to be done is to partition off part of your hard drive for Vista to load and run from. Partitioning a hard drive basically means you are taking unused space and setting aside for a defined purpose, namely Vista. There are a number of programs that are useful for this task, I would recommend Paragon Partition Manager(http://www.partition-manager.com/) as it worked beautifully for me. There is also a popular free hard drive manager that runs as your computer boots up called Gparted(http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php).

Make sure when you are parititoning off space that you take into account how big the Vista OS is and any programs you would want to put on there. I would estimate atleast 40 Gbs of space should be partitioned off for this process. At some point the computer will have to restart and work on the hard drive before anything is loaded. Be patient here, it may appear frozen but give it time, Paragon froze on me for 15 minutes before displaying a 'success' screen. If you get impatient and move to restart, don't expect your hard drive to work like it should.

Now once you boot back into Windows XP, it's always a good idea to check and make sure everything looks alright with your new partition. If everything looks ok, pop in the Vista CD at this time, while running in XP. It will still allow you to install to the partition and everything will go off without a hitch. After a sucessful install and reboot you will be prompted with an OS selection screen stating such:

Earlier Verson of Windows
Windows Vista

Obviously the earlier version is XP and Vista is... Vista. Choose which you want here and enjoy having the best of both worlds.

P.S. I couldn't post in the FAQ forum so I chose the closest thing to my topic. My first FAQ so it's a bit short and uninvolved, but I think it gets the job done

Edstrung

Nice mini-FAQ Answered one of my questions before I asked it!

The other question would be, once you realise Vista is actually working fine and you are ready to take the plunge and remove XP from your system, would you have to do a fresh install w/format or can u basically delete the partition from the HDD with XP on it, after transferring your files/media from one partition to the other?

Nice1

DigitalPhreak

No, you shouldnt have to do everything all over. You could just format the partition that xp is on and use bcdedit to modify your boot configuration in vista. Of course if you wanted to get rid of the partition you would have to use partition magic or the partition manager from acronis and merge the partitions or whatever you wanted. I think you may be able to edit the boot options in vista using the disc. Cant remember. Ill take a look later on.

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Edstrung

Thanks to both of you then!

Sorry took a while, but been very sleepy this week, it 11am and im still yawning like hell