Wonder of anyone can help. Very recently I bought a new PC and it came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. (I now use this old for the internet) Looks like a good new OS, but soon I discovered that some older software has problems running in it, or outright refuses to work when it worked perfect in XP.

I read somewhere about dual booting and thought that would be the thing for me, as I don't really want to get rid of Vista, it is the new OS afterall. It's just that there's nothing that takes advantage of it atm. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, I have bought, installed and formatted a new 250GB SATA HDD, (the main one with Vista on it is an IDE) assigned it the letter E, and thats as far as I've got. (both now show up in My Computer and are in NTFS format)

So Vista HDD is C; DVD Drive is D; and new HDD is E.

Next step is to buy a copy of XP, and here is where I need help because I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to this kinda stuff. I've done quite a lot of reading but it's difficult to find someone in the same boat, either they are looking for a way to install XP on the same drive by partitioning it, or XP is installed first and other variations etc ect...though there are a few I found but they offer conflicting advice.

What I need is someone to tell me what to do next. Step by step. As I said I'm quite a noob at this stuff.

Any advice will be much appreciated, thankyou

I think the process you need to follow is this. Maybe somebody else with more experience can confirm!

1. Do a clean install of XP on your new second HDD (D: ) and boot into it (don't panic that Vista has disappeared!)
2. Install VistaBootPro in XP (you will also need MS's Net framework I think?)
3. Start VistaBootPro
4. Select "Manage OS entries" and add "Windows Legacy for XP"
5. Click on "Reinstall the Vista bootloader"
6. Reboot and you should see the dual boot menu!

Again, if you don't have a Vista disk, before you try this, get somebody else to confirm as I haven't done this, but I think this is how you would do it!

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A.Rajesh Khanna