Windows Vista forum: Dual Booting Windows Vista and Windows XP

Thunderhead

If it bothers you to delete the recovery partition you can save it to a disk.


You cant use Partition Magic in VISTA.

You cant use PowerQuest Drive Image 7.0 in VISTA.

You MUST have a recovery DVD that came with the computer so if you want to reinstall VISTA you just put the DVD drive and boot to it.

DONT GO ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU HAVE A VISTA DVD AS A RECOVERY DISK.

PLUS you need an external hard drive plugged in and turned on at step 6.


HERE IS HOW IT MUST BE DONE MY WAY.

1. I would put the XP CD in the drive and boot to press any key to boot from CD.

2. When it loads and gives you options, choose delete the VISTA operating system.

3. Put the Windows XP in and boot and install on the unformatted space left from deleting the Vista operating system.

4. Install Partition Magic.

5. Install Microsoft NetFramework 1.1

6. Install PowerQuest Drive Image 7.0

7. Boot

8. Open a partition on an external hard drive and create a new folder and label it {recovery disk ,partition 1} you must label it the correct partition NUMBER that it is found on the hard drive reading the drive from left to right.

8. Open PowerQuest Drive Image 7.0 and choose back up a drive.

9. Choose the recovery partition.

10. Make the target the folder you just created in the external hard drive.

11. When it is finished you now have a recovery partition saved on your external hard drive.

12. Click next and it will save the drive image of the recovery partition into the folder labeled {recovery disk ,partition 1}. It will only take a minute or two since it is very small partition.

13. At this point you could restore the computer to its original condition.

14. If you had an old computer to practice on you would do this to restore it to the condition it was in when you bought it. Find an old computer and practice this stuff, it is really easy.

15. Erase the hard drive.

16. Boot to Windows XP and do steps 3,4,5,6,7.

Step three will only be one big unformatted hard drive whereas in the original step 3 above the hard drive still had partition one as the recovery partition.

17. Open partition magic and create a new primary partition and make it about size of the original recovery partition{make is 20 MBs bigger} and make it a fat file system.

18. Now open PowerQuest Drive Image 7.0 and select restore a drive and restore the saved recovery partition in your external hard drive to the primary partition you just created in step 17.

19. Now put the Vista DVD in the drive and boot.

20.When Windows asks you what you want to do , DELETE the Windows XP operating system you were just using and install VISTA on the unformatted space and your computer is back to the way it was>>>>>> WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT.>>>>>>>>>