Installing Xp after Vista with no bootable XP CD

Ok for those who want to dual boot Xp and Vista you can do it in many ways.... The best way is to first install Vista on your hard drive and then install XP... You would be needing a bootable XP CD to do that actually since XP setup cannot be started from Vista directly.... Perhaps if you have recently slipstreamed updates and stuff using nLite and do not want to waste burning a CD for that you can still start XP Setup from the hard drive itself.... Here is how it is done :

Boot your laptop and while booting keep repeatedly tapping F8 (not pressing it continuosly) and you would come across many boot options....

There you select Safe Mode with Command Prompt and it would boot into Vista and give you a command prompt after booting

Navigate to the folder where you have your XP Install files say C:\XPSETUP then type cd \xpsetup

Then navigate into the i386 folder ( by typing cd i386 ) and start the setup by typing winnt32.exe

It would give an error message saying your Windows Version is newer than the one being installed and so only the New Installation option is available.... Just click OK and continue with the Setup....

The rest all is the regular procedure.... Also in this method the copying of the initial XP setup files onto the hard drive is faster compared to the same done using Boot by cd (probably because the first stage copying is done in Windows itself)....

I tried to find a way to do the above on Google by nowhere I could find an article for this and so I hope this article helps someone.....

 

how does this work? do you have to already have XP installed?
Are you implying that Vista has a copy of XP on it?
Im confused.

 

Instead of installing XP from the disc, here XP is installed from a copy of the disc on the hard drive.

No.

No.

"Ash" is trying to install XP from a copy saved at C:\XPSETUP. "Ash" first copies the i386 folder from XP disc to C:\XPSETUP, then he installs XP by running the command C:\XPSETUP\i386\winnt32.exe from Vista's Safe Mode with Command Prompt.

Q: Why install from a hard drive copy instead of the original disc?
A: The installation is faster and takes less time.

Q: Why is it faster?
A: As "Ash" mentions, it is faster because the setup files are copied from one area of the hard drive to another rather than from the optical disc to the hard drive.

Is this information helpful? What else you would like to know?

 

Not only is it faster because setup runs from the hard drive but also the fact that copying those files are done in Windows mode rather than in DOS mode.... DOS mode copying has serious limitations on the data transfer rate.....