Vista and Xp, a dual boot guide

Dual booting is not a very hard task. But it requires a bit of prerequisite knowledge and if not done with care can lead to disaster. This guide assumes that you already have windows vista installed.
1. Boot with Windows Xp cd and wait till it loads necessary files.
2. Then select the volume in which you want to install Xp (choose a different drive than the one with vista installed. If you don’t have two volumes you can use vista’s built in disk resize utility.)

3. Now you can choose whether to format the drive or not. Be careful because by formatting you loose all the data in the drive.
4. Now setup will copy all the necessary files and reboot. After the reboot you will be prompted to enter the product key and some more information.
5. After that you will be able to boot into Xp. But at this point Vista bootloader will be overwritten by Xp and you will lose the ability to boot into vista.
6. If you have vista DVD things are pretty simple. Just boot with your DVD and enter the recovery console. Click startup repair and you will get back vista bootloader.
7. If you don’t have the DVD or vista came pre-installed you will have to use a 3rd party app like vistabootPRO or easyBCD and reinstall vista bootloader.
In vistabootPRO click system bootloader and select vista bootloader and all drives. Click Install. The procedure is similar with easyBCD.
8. Now go to vista and install the utility you are using and add a new entry Windows XP and change the boot drive to the one in which Xp is installed. You might have to copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from Xp CD before you can boot to Xp. Dual booting is not a very hard task. But it requires a bit of prerequisite knowledge and if not done with care can lead to disaster. This guide assumes that you already have windows vista installed.
1. Boot with Windows Xp cd and wait till it loads necessary files.
2. Then select the volume in which you want to install Xp (choose a different drive than the one with vista installed. If you don’t have two volumes you can use vista’s built in disk resize utility.)
3. Now you can choose whether to format the drive or not. Be careful because by formatting you loose all the data in the drive.
4. Now setup will copy all the necessary files and reboot. After the reboot you will be prompted to enter the product key and some more information.
5. After that you will be able to boot into Xp. But at this point Vista bootloader will be overwritten by Xp and you will lose the ability to boot into vista.
6. If you have vista DVD things are pretty simple. Just boot with your DVD and enter the recovery console. Click startup repair and you will get back vista bootloader.
7. If you don’t have the DVD or vista came pre-installed you will have to use a 3rd party app like vistabootPRO or easyBCD and reinstall vista bootloader.
In vistabootPRO click system bootloader and select vista bootloader and all drives. Click Install. The procedure is similar with easyBCD.
8. Now go to vista and install the utility you are using and add a new entry Windows XP and change the boot drive to the one in which Xp is installed. You might have to copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from Xp CD before you can boot to Xp.