Dual Boot Vista/XP On Acer aspire 5720

I'm getting an Acer Aspire for Christmas and i want to dual boot as it comes with vista and i would like to have XP aswell. Ive had a look at the acer and the hard drive comes already split into two halfs with the second drive containing nothing, i was wondering if i could install XP to this?

i have these files, will i need anything else to install XP?

 

Have a look at this article on installing an XP dual boot after Vista has been installed.

http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp

You will also need to have your SATA drivers extracted and available on either a floppy or a USB flash drive (if your BIOS allows it to emulate a floppy drive), so that you can use the "F6" option during XP install.

 

Hi thanks for the reply in that guide it speaks of using a vista disc, all i have in my pack is a disc that says vista upgrade and the machine came preloaded with vista, so it that the right disc? Oh and how do i extract my SATA drivers to a usb flash drive. Thanks for your help

 

You will need a bootable Vista disc to use the diskpart utility to resize the vista partition so that you have enough space available to create a separate partition for your XP install (this could also be done with disk management utilities like Acronis Disk Director Suite or Partition Magic or even with some linux distributions' install/live discs). You will need a bootable Vista disc though to repair Vista's Master Boot Record (MBR) after installing XP, as XP overwrites Vista's MBR and XP's bootloader is not compatible with Vista.

As to your Vista Upgrade disc, I'm not sure. It may be, but you need to try booting from it to find out. You will definitely need a bootable Vista install disk to repair Vista's boot loader though.

You can extract your drivers by opening the zip file "AHCI_Intel_v7.5.0.1017_CP.zip", that you show in the picture in your previous post, and clicking on "Extract All". Copy the files iaAhci.inf, iaAhci.cat, iaStor.inf, iaStor.cat, iaStor.sys, and TxtSetup.oem to the root directory of your floppy or USB flash drive (reminder, the USB flash drive will only work if your BIOS allows it to emulate a floppy...I don't know if yours does or not, so you may want to break down and spend the ~$20-$30 for a USB floppy drive, just to be on the safe side). Keep in mind that whatever you use, USB floppy, or USB flash drive, it must be connected to your laptop and configured in the BIOS already when you boot from the XP disc, or the XP installer will not see it.

 

Hi thanks again how would i know that my BIOS allows me to emulate the a floppy using a USB drive, i dont mind buying a USB floppy disc i just want to be sure i can't do it without it first.

 

Without having access to an Aspire 5720, I couldn't tell you with any authority what exactly it is in the BIOS of your machine. If it can be done, it would normally be in the BIOS menu that deals with boot device configuration, but could also be found somewhere else depending on how Acer configured the BIOS menus. I would recommend you getting a USB floppy drive just for simplicity.