James Bannan05 June 2007, 11:19 PM
Want to install Vista on your PC but don't want to get rid of XP just yet? Here's how to install it so you can dual-boot between them, in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide.
Page 1 - Intro
Scenario: You want to install Vista on your PC alongside your XP installation, on the same drive.
You have already installed XP. (If you installed Vista first, see our other tutorial on
How to dual-boot Vista and XP - with Vista installed first.)
Tutorial Summary: We're going to use the DISKPART utility on the Vista DVD to shrink the Windows XP partition on the hard disk and create enough space for an installation of Vista. We'll then install Vista and use the EasyBCD utility to modify Vista's bootloader to get XP loading properly.
This is an updated tutorial,based on our first Windows XP/Vista dual-booting workshop. The main difference is that we're covering using both the latest version of GParted and DISKPART to shrink the Windows XP partition.
DISKPART can shrink NTFS partitions and it's certainly the more convenient option, but on some systems using DISKPART to shrink the volume will fail, with an vague "Access is denied" error.
This may have something to do with different disk controllers, as this was a problem on the AcerPower test system which has a SATA hard drive, but not on the VMWare system which uses a virtual IDE controller. So we'll cover both processes
EasyBCD has also been updated since the first tutorial was written.
This tutorial was tested on a VMWare Workstation 6 virtual machine and an AcerPower SK50.