HP G60 Wont allow for dual-boot with vista and xp

I currently have a HP G60-121wm

Heres the specs:
AMD Sempron SI-40 2.00 GHz processor
3.00 GB of DDR2 Ram
32 bit windows vista home premium
160GB HDD

I have 121GB left on my hdd w/o partitioning any of it. I partitioned 50.1GB into a NFTS simple volume.

I have a geniune windows xp disc. And when i reboot and attempt to boot from my disk drive, all my comp does is ignore the command. And then resume booting windows vista.

Is there any reason why it would do this?
If so is there a way i can fix it?

Heres a few pics of what i did to create the partition







And last
the after.

 

Is this you're trying to boot into your installed Windows XP, but it's still loading Vista, or that you're trying to boot into your Windows XP installation CD?
If it's the latter, then you will have to go into BIOS and change the boot order so that it searches the optical drive first. Some optical drives take a while before they are ready (longer than the computer is prepared to wait) so if your computer has a boot menu, you can go into that, wait till the drive is ready, and then select the optical drive to boot.

To change boot options, Run Bios (on boot press F10).
Go to: System Configuration menu -> Boot Options:

❐ USB Floppy
❐ Internal CD/DVD ROM Drive
❐ Hard drive
❐ USB Diskette on Key
❐ USB Hard drive
❐ Network adapter

Select their boot order and press F10 for saving it. - link

 

Can most retail laptops even downgrade?

 

Sure, but not a simple thing to do if the drivers and special apps are not being made available from the manufacturers direct.

cheers ...

 

I have my BIOS set to boot from CD first.

And i'm trying to install XP from a Windows XP disc. But i will try to wait for the disc drive to load and let you know.

 

Hey Namaiki,
My bios is setup exactly as you said.

I tried rebooting and stalling in the BIOS for the CD is start spinning and get ready. And even that didn't work

The laptop is less than 7 months old.

And a new harddrive was put in less than a month ago by HP

 

Do you have a boot manager on your hard drive? something that will ID bootable partitions and give you a choice of installed OSs.

 

I'm trying to install windows xp and the only programs i have are what comes with vista.
But i can buy or download anything that will help

 

if you want to dual-boot multiple OS from a hard drive, you will need a boot manager. Do some googling on this.

IMHO, a far better solution is to decide on your 'core' os and run virtual machines for each of your experimental os on top of that. No dual-boot hassle, no multiple partition hassle, and you can recover the used hard drive space any time.

www.virtualbox.org is one product.

 

Thanks Newsposter

i just need a way to have windows xp on my laptop because the college i'm going to only teaches on windows xp. and i don't want to have to use the computer that they will provide.

I'll look into both types. Thanks very much
Been very helpful. and if i knew how to give rep. i would.

 

Ok so i have a boot manager now.

But even with the damned boot manager i still can't full install xp onto a partition of my internal hdd..........

 

Ok so i have a boot manager called OSL2000

and the boot manager is working b/c it asks me everytime i boot what hdd i want to boot from

but i still cant boot from cd to install xp onto a partition

this is quite frustrating......

i guess i have to buy a new hdd and just put xp on it.....

 

are you running an official xp disk? or did you burn an iso?