Vista Dual Boot with XP Installation

Anytime the conversation turns to dual booting a computer the question is always asked why anyone would want to go through the hassle of keeping two operating systems running when one can be enough of a headache. It's a legitimate question and one that isn't always easily answered. In my particular case, I do it because I write about both XP and Vista and switch back and forth between them regularly. I also make extensive use of virtual machines, and as convenient as virtual machines can be, it isn't always the same as having the operating system running directly from the system. When XP was first released I wasn't willing to scrap the previous operating system right away and rely on XP. I think it was a bit over two years before I finally ran XP in a single operating system configuration.

So really, why would you want to dual boot Vista and another operating system? Vista is brand new (discounting the five plus years it took to get it to market) and as much as we all might like to believe it's going to work flawlessly, that just isn't the case. There are going to hardware and software compatibility issues that will crop up as time passes. Some programs you use regularly may not work at all in Vista until a Vista compatible version is released. There will undoubtedly be hardware compatibility issues until new drivers are released by the hardware manufacturers, and some hardware and software may never be updated to take full advantage of Vista. To my way of thinking, those two issues alone make an excellent case for dual booting Vista and XP until those issues are resolved. If you find something that doesn't work in Vista, reboot into XP and go about business as normal.

It's not overly hard to set up a system to dual boot operating systems, especially if you are willing to do a clean install of both operating systems to facilitate the best results. It is essential that the two operating systems be installed on separate partitions if they are located on the same drive. Another option is to install them on separate hard drives. Unfortunately, the majority of systems have one hard drive and in most cases use a single, large partition. If this is the current state of your system it will be necessary to resize the primary partition and create an additional partition from the unallocated space using a third party partitioning tool. The partitioning tools included from Microsoft allow you to 'extend' a partition into unallocated space on a drive to make the partition larger, but do not allow the partition to be made smaller. To accomplish that feat with the Microsoft tools you have to delete the current partition and then create two new partitions on the drive to hold the two operating systems. In the screen capture below there are two separate hard drives. Windows XP would be installed on Drive 0 and Vista would reside on Disk 1. If I have to tell you to make sure all files and data are externally backed up, and you have the appropriate disks to install both operating systems and applications before doing any kind of install, then you probably shouldn't be doing it anyway.

As far as the actual installation is concerned, it's a very straight forward process. Start the installation by booting from the Vista DVD and move through the screens until you arrive at the type of installation option. Select [ Custom ] and then select the partition/drive where Vista will be installed. That's essentially it because the installer will take care of adding the Windows Boot Manager as shown below. Each time you boot the system you can either boot into Vista or whatever earlier version of Windows was on the system.