dual boot vista and xp with an hp dv9000t

Hey all im getting a new dv9000t shortly and i was planning on dual booting both OSes.

The Hp comes with vista home premium installed, and i want to make that the primary OS for productivity, word processing, and internet, basically most of the things.

Im a gamer too, and mainly i want to play oblivion. Oblivion and Vista are having compatibility issues now, and i thought it would be best to have XP to play oblivion on.

I have heard things that concern me about partitioning the hard drive. I heard that the HP feature, Quickplay, which allows booting the media on the computer without loading the OS wont work ie it will load the OS and then play the media, if you mess around with the partitioning

I want to know how to avoid this all while installing XP. i want to keep the standard partitions if possilble because i heard that HP installs a partition specifically for restoring the computer to its factory state. Im not sure if its necessary to keep that though.

So basically im just wondering what steps to take to ensure that i keep vista XP and the quickplay partition, ie what steps to take and everything.

I know its alot but if anyone could try to help that would be excellent! Thanks so much in advance!

 

does nobody know about doing this? or am i just crazy to think that thatll work?

 

HP upgraded Quickplay at the same time as they introduced Vista and the newer version(3.0) of Quickplay does not have a separate bootable partition. So by default on your system Quickplay should be exactly doing what you describe. Changing the partitions shouldnt affect thsis but even if it does then all you have to do is boot into Vista and then press the Quickplay buttons. It takes the same amount of time as pressing the QP button before starting the system.

Since you already have Vista installed, you will need to use an application like Vistaboot pro( http://www.vistabootpro.org/) to restore the Vista boot manager after installing XP. XP doesnt recognise the Vista boot manager and thereby after you install XP on the system you will only be able to boot into XP. Thats when you use Vistaboot pro to restore the Vista boot manager. Search the web if you need specific instructions on how to restore the Vista boot manager after installing XP.

Since you have a dv9000t with the Intel SATA controller, you will have to go through some extra steps to install XP since it does not recognise the SATA HDD. Follow one of the guides stickied in the HP/Compaq section of the forum.

As for as the recovery partition goes, if you have burnt the recovery discs then it is safe to delete the partition. The recovery discs have the ability to restore the system to factory defaults which includes the recovery partition and the OS. If you havent burnt these discs then burn them or order another copy from HP before trying to install XP. Also remember to backup your data to a external HDD or DVD before changing anything on the system.

 

This is my case and hope it can give you some idea.

I have an HP DV9212-TX dual boot Vista and XP Pro., with 2 X 160 SATA harddisk. The Vista is pre-installed on HD 1, and HP also has another recovery partition (about 5GB). And my XP is installed on the same HD by shrinking some space out from the Vista partition.

I got both OS running perfectly. But I just did a test after reading this thread. The QP doesn't work. When I press the DVD or QP button. It starts and load the Vista Bootloader.
It doesn't bother me much because I rarely use QP function.

Good luck.