Dual OS: Vista/XP

Hey all,

Recently I posted a thread aksing about what games vista would be compatible with, and someone suggested running both XP (for Games) and Vista for normal usage.

My question is, how do I got about that? I have an XP disc and everything, but what about the drivers for all my sound cards, grafix cards, bluetooth etc. Can they be found on the dell website?

Also, what about space for my laptop. I have a Hard Drive: 160GB Serial ATA (5400RPM), will that be sufficient to have both OS and still have room for music/games etc.

And if I can't have both, how do I go about just having XP?

Sorry if there's already threads on this, I searched but can't find any about dual OS.

Thanks for your time,

 

all games i know of work fine with vista. they have come out with patches for all that make them compatible. however to dual boot. split your partition in windows. allot however much space to each operating system. then, pop in your xp installation disk, and install it to your other partition that vista is not on. you may however after installing xp, need to go back and pop in the vista disk and repair the installation of vista to make the bootloader work proper. i know its ok from having first xp then vista, but i dont think the other way around.

 

I think there's plenty of space on a 160 GB drive for both. If you're already rearranging partitions to multi-boot, I'd make the partitions as follows:

1. Diagnostics (50 MB hidden)
2. Dell Media Direct (?GB hidden)
3. Vista System Partition (20 GB)
4. Extended partition with:
a) XP System partition (20 GB)
b) Data partition (100+ GB).

 

If it's the Vostro 1500 in your sig, then yes, Dell has all the XP drivers lined up neatly on the their support site. Just go look up your model and select the option of XP drivers.

If you want to dual boot XP/Vista I think you'll have install XP first, then Vista otherwise the XP boot manager won't recognize Vista. But I think there are third party boot managers to take care of this...

 

yup you can find the drivers for the Vostro 1500 (Windows XP) in support.dell.com

 

what i did was:
download all xp drivers for my system onto a flash drive
make a 20GB partition for xp, formatted that partition
restart twice
install xp on my partition that vista isnt on
install the drivers that were saved onto my flash drive
download and install vistabootpro
go to "manage bootloader" or something similar
install the vista bootloader, not legacy, on all drives
make a new OS option on one of the other tabs, make on for xp, choose hard drive where xp is and save/apply
restart
i can now pick to boot either xp or vista

i have an m1330 with a 120GB hard drive, so... yeah. but this should work. im not saying follow what i did though.