Dual Booting Windows Vista and XP on a preinstalled dv9000 HP Vista Machine

Hi. My question is the same as the title...I have no idea how to install and dual boot my machine with both Vista and XP. I've tried to install XP but it doesn't find the hard drive nor the partition. Where do I begin and could someone give me step by step directions? Unfortunately Vista has reached the end of my patients and with this computer I'm just thrilled when I put in a disk and it reads it.

Thank you all very much.

 

To install HP you will need to slipstream SATA driver into a XP disc so that it can recognise the SATA HDD's. This is explained in the sticky right here...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=165319

Another option would be to disable Native SATA support in the BIOS and then install XP. This will only work in the older dv9000 series since the newer versions dont have such an option in the BIOS.

After installin XP you will have to restore the boot manager for Vista if you want to keep /boot into Vista. This is explained in detail here...
http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

But before you do any of these make sure you burn the recovery discs. Also you might want to consider doing a freh reinstall of Vista following the guide linked below. It might be useful if your problems are related to the junk software HP installs on their systems.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

 

+1

That's pretty much what I did and both are working well on my DV.

 

Thank you both so much. I'm gonna be doin this today so we'll see how the day ends up turning out.

 

Alright...new update.

I have run into a problem with the HP recovery manager not letting me fix but rather reinstall the image back on to the hard disk. What do I do now? I was able to get XP loaded and the disk that I have for vista is the HP recovery DVD. I was wondering if I could get the prompt for redirecting the boot prompt from the command prompt from XP and change things from there because when the dvd from Vista goes in, all I get is the HP recovery manager that wants to format the disk and reinstall vista. What now?

 

What I ened up doing was to let the recovery disk do its thing (i.e. - create a recovery partition and a Vista partition) then resize/create a second partition (I found the easiest way was to use msconfig to boot into safe mode the do the repartition there)on which I installed XP. Then I used the Vista disk to boot into Vista and set up the dual boot.