Dual booting XP/Vista on my m1330?

Hi everyone,

I've decided to reformat my m1330 so I can dual boot Vista and XP, but I have a bunch of questions that hopefully someone here can answer.

1) A quick look at the hard drive partitions ended up causing me quite a bit of confusion. I saw:

a. A tiny, inaccessible partition of around 60mb in size... What is this? Is this something I should keep around, at least until the end of the warranty period?
b. The normal Vista partition
c. The recovery partition. If I wipe this out, what exactly do I lose given how all m1330s ship with reinstallation disks?
d. The media direct partition.

Essentially I want just 1 partition for Vista and 1 for XP, but...

2) About the media direct partition, I heard that wiping it out can brick your system if you accidentally hit the media direct button? So I was wondering if it's possible to reprogram the media direct button to start XP while keeping the power button booting Vista. A forum search turned up some conflicting answers, so I was wondering if anyone's actually done it before, and if they have do they have any instructions or tips on doing so? The closest I could find was a guide on Vista/Linux.

3) Dell doesn't provide any XP drivers for the m1330, and I doubt that XP has any of the necessary drivers by default, so would the Vista drivers work on XP?

 

Welcome to the forums Peon


I'll try and answer your questions:

1a. The hidden partition contains the 'Diagnostics' files.

1c. If you wipe the 'Recovery' partition, you won't be able to use the supplied disc to perform a recovery to factory settings.
You'll still be able to use it to install the OS of course.

2. I've read that somewhere too, so I wouldn't like to offer advice on whether it can be safely deleted or not?

3. It's possible that some of them may work... but the general consensus, is that you should use XP specific drivers.

You'll find links to most (if not all) of the required XP drivers for the M1330, on this page.
You may find the guide itself useful too

 

Thanks for the link to the XP install guide TheRealFireblade... I would never have thought to disable SATA support via the BIOS without it.

I basically blew away the recovery partition and used that to install XP after making more room by shrinking the Vista partition. So now I have the diagnostic, Vista, XP, and mediadirect partitions on my hard drive.

I'm still looking for ideas on how to reprogram the mediadirect button so I can blow away the mediadirect partition though... Since mediadirect is just Windows XP I'm quite surprised nobody seems to have tried this.