T61P Vista clean install complete...want to install and dual boot XP Pro

Thanks to stallen's very well put together Vista clean install guide, I re-installed Vista (without all the extra crap). I got rid of the hidden partition also and setup the HD with three new partitions. Vista is on the C drive and I would like to put XP Pro on the D drive and the 3rd parition just for file storage to share between Vista and XP (I'm assuming this will work since they will both be in NTFS correct?). Any ways I'm ready to install XP and have been doing a little research about this procedure. I found this thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=136351&page=3&highlight=xp+install) explaining the process of installing XP on a Vista machine to replace Vista. I want to know if there are any other precautions I must take that this thread doesn't talk about since I will be leaving Vista on. If anyone else has done this same process that I'm about to do and has any tips that would be great. Thanks all!

 

I'd highly recommend that the third partition for shared storage be FAT 32, i believe vista and XP use different versions of NTFS, plus if in the future you decide to triple with linux its much happier with FAT32 than NTFS. The only forceable problem would be that FAT32 has a file size limit somewhere around 4 gigs.

 

Besides possibly a page file (or memory dump) or some crazy movie, what type of file would be more than 4 gigs?

...I'm interested in this as well, I am thinking of dual-booting & trying out Ubuntu in the near future.

 

DVD images of course and pagefiles, also hiberfil.sys depending on the amount of ram you have, but overall Linux is much happier and easier when its using a FAT partition, NTFS gets tricky there have been improvments, ubt it still aint perfect.

 

Well -- triple boot? I'd rather just run it as a VM. I've got Vista with 3 VM's, XPP, W2003 Server (for work), and W98 (for simulation). Works just fine with 3 gigs of memory.

Phil

 

I could reformat that 3rd partition basically anytime in FAT32. What I'm concerned about now is just getting XP installed.

 

I do not think you need to use FAT32, that is pretty much only win98 stuff. IIRC it was Fat16 that had the size limit, there was something with a 32 gb size limit, but there was a patch that fixed it
The trick with adding winXP second is the boot loader for XP will not see vista, so you will need to do a repair of vista to reset your boot loader

 

Do you have to repair the boot-loader every time you run XP, or just after installing XP?

If I have an existing system with XP, would it be easier to somehow cram all of my data to one side of the drive and create a new partition on which to install Vista? Or is that a bunch of nonsense?

 

just after the reinstall to use the vista one