Adding Windows XP to Vista

Adding Windows XP to Vista

Maybe you want to add Windows XP to your new Vista operating system

Welcome traveler to our continuing hubs on everything Vista for you to use in your adventures with Microsoft's newest operating system. Today well be discussing how to add Windows XP to your new preloaded Vista operating system, something that is no more difficult that adding Vista to an older machine as we did in the last hub, with one small hitch. You're going to need to track down all the drivers WinXP needs for your hardware for this to work.

The majority of the time, a consumer can just go to their computer vendor's Web site and download all the WinXP drivers they need. Just make sure you save them all to a CD-R or USB flash drive so you can put them into WinXP after the initial installation is complete. One new thing is newer SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drives: WinXP normally requires you to load any hard drive controller drivers (such as SCSI [Small Computer System Interface], RAID [Redundancy Array of Independent Drives], and SATA) with a floppy diskette at the start of the installation, but most newer computers don't even come with floppy diskette drives. Find your spare floppy drive (USB floppy drives don't count); if you have one, and a way to connect it, even temporarily, this is the fastest way to achieve the goal. Otherwise, you'll need to build a new WinXP installation disc with your SATA drivers "slipstreamed" in. The best way to achieve this creation of a new WinXP installation disc, if you're not going to attempt building a new installation disc yourself, is with nLite (www.nliteos.com) or the RyanVM Integrator (www.ryanvm.net/msfn), just make sure read the instructions with each program very carefully and it should be relatively easy.

Okay now that you have a usable WinXP installation disc in hand, the process is fairly easy because the disc partition tool built into Vista can non-destructively resize partitions, clearing aside space for WinXP. To make use of it, right-click Computer and then choose Manage from the pop-up men, in the resulting window, choose Disk Management. Next, right-click your hard drive in the bottom half of the windows and click Shrink Volume, enter the size (in megabytes) of your new partition and click the Shrink button. After a few moments, the new, unallocated space appears in black on the screen for easy viewing. Finally, right-click the Unallocated Space and then click New Simple Volume, follow the wizard, assign the space a drive letter, format it as NTFS (NT file system), and lastly give it a Volume label such as "WinXP". At this time you should restart Vista to finalize the partition and then you should be asked to restart yet again, do so.

Grab your WinXP installation disc and insert it, reboot the computer and let it boot from the CD, and install WinXP to the new "WinXP" partition you just created and named. Make sure to install all the hardware drivers after the initial OS installation.

When this is completed, the computer should automatically boot into Windows XP for the first time. In fact, at this point in time there isn't even a Boot Menu that will let you boot into Vista, but this can be easily remedied. If you want to do this, from WinXP, download and install VistaBootPro from http://www.vistabootpro.org/, you'll probably also have to download and install Microsoft's .NET 2.0 Framework, but the VistaBootPro installer checks for it and will provide a download link if it's absent.

Once you have these software tidbits installed, run VistaBootPro, ignore all the notes to back up your BCD (Binary Coded Decimal), and then click the System Bootloader button. Put a check mark in the Windows Vista Bootloader checkbox and All Drives checkboxes and then click the Install Bootloader button. Choose Run Diagnostics from the Diagnostics menu and then set any boot options that you prefer, we all have preferences. Also, at this time, you can use VistaBootPro to rename entries in the Vista Boot Menu, like altering "Earlier Version Of Windows" to "Windows XP". Take a deep breath, were almost there, finally, reboot your computer, and you should hopefully see Vista's Boot Menu staring back at you, ready to let you pick whatever operating system you want to work your magic with.

Well that's it for another informative hub on everything Vista; we hope this hub helped you achieve your goal of adding WinXP to your Vista computer. Were happy to be able to bring you the information for you to learn and love about Microsoft's newest operating system. Join us next time as we will be discussing common questions about installing Vista as there are several ways to accomplish this feat of computing magic and people have been coming forward with a ton of questions related to the subject. Until then traveler, happy hubbing!