Dual Booting Vista & XP with downgrade disc?

My gf's SZ680N came with Vista Business and we were looking at going for a Vista/XP dual boot setup. Can I use the downgrade disc to install XP in another partition?

I know I can install my own XP I'd like to use the Sony one for completeness sake. Anyone try this?

 

If the downgrade disc works like a recovery disc (I believe it does) then you will have no control over the partitions that it gets installed to. I think your best best is to use (their) provided Vista OS and a XP retail disc to accomplish what you want. You can change the product keys later to match the sticker but keep in mind that you're probably going to run afoul of the licensing terms for Windows; there is a chance that your product key will be invalidated.

As an alternative I would recommend either a Vista/Ubuntu or XP/Ubuntu dual boot. Why don't you introduce your gf to Linux? If you haven't taken a look at Ubuntu recently it has come a long way since it's initial release.

 

I dual boot

The Anytime Upgrade vista disc will allow you to choose installation on a separate partition aside from the XP partition.

But if you use any sort of "manufacturer tied discs" you will most likely not have control over the partitions it gets installed on or creation of other partitions.

With using just original install discs and the keys, you will still have to find some drivers etc. manually for your unit. In my case XP is not fully compatible, but i use it to help troubleshoot problems on other computers, therefore having all the drivers to make everything work on my CR is not of importance.

Hope this info helps.

You can however, also create a partition after installing vista - google for more info.

 

Thanks guys! I thought it'd be a pain...

I already used the Vista recovery discs I made to reinstall. So far, I've set up 4 partitions. One for the recovery stuff, one for Vista, one empty one waiting for XP and a final one for storage. I may have to just install my retail copy of XP and wrestle with getting the drivers to work. Maybe I can just extract the drivers from the XP recovery disc.

Also, if I want to change the XP key, which one would I use? The XP recovery discs from Sony does not have any key on the package. Maybe I have to run the recovery on another computer (while getting a load of errors) and try to extract the key from there?

 

Yup. Best bet is to run XP (using there downgrade disc) and extract the product key. My downgrade disc also did not have a key. Kind of makes you wonder how that works huh? Maybe they're using a volume license key on those discs?