Installing Windows XP on Vista

25 Apr, 2009, 9:55 am IST | by Sandeep Balachandran

Making Vista and Windows XP dual boot can be quite a pain, but not if you make use of the right tools.

Installing Windows XP on Vista

With the majority of laptop and desktop manufacturers preloading their systems with Vista today, we are witnessing the end of the Windows XP era. Just like the extinction of previous operating systems, Windows XP has officially been laid to rest. The same will apply to Vista in the near future, but the march of time shouldn’t stop us from running whatever OS we want (as long as we own a legal licensed copy).

The problem here, as always, has been with the installation of an older operating system over a new one. In doing so, the existing bootloader is overwritten (in this case Vista's is overwritten by the older XP bootloader), making it impossible to boot into the newer OS.

To further complicate matters, editing the boot file isn’t the same as it used to be with XP, since Vista relies on multiple resources to boot, including Bcdedit and Bootmgr to name a few, rather than the simple 'boot.ini' file. This makes editing the bootloader a pretty complex task, since adding or removing entries can only be done via the command prompt.

So if you have Vista preinstalled and you really want to dual boot it with XP, one tool you can use is VistaBootPro, which you can downloaded from www.vistabootpro.org. Back up your files before starting, and follow these simple steps.

Tags: Windows , Xp , Vista

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