How to... Add XP to a Vista machine

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Bugged by the fact you've upgraded to Vista, and have found that the software you've got no longer works or behaves erratically?

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Yeah, me too. While you could get annoyed at the fact publishers are charging people money for upgrades and patches you wouldn't have needed had you stuck with XP, the best thing to do is stick with Vista and install XP. Get it right and you'll be hopping happily between the two Windows without a care in the world.

The first thing you need to do is work out how much room you need, and that depends on what you're planning to do with it. On its own, XP eats about 1.5GB of your hard drive, so the minimum space you need is 2GB - enough for the operating system, plus a small amount of data.

If you're looking to play all the games you put in the loft because they refused to work under Vista, as a rule of thumb you should add 2GB for every CD-based title and 10GB for those on DVD.

01. Making room for an old friend
Open the Start Menu on your Vista machine, right-click the Computer entry and choose Manage from the pop-up menu.

Now click the Disk Management node under Storage on the left, right-click the drive icon where you want to install XP and choose Properties. Name the drive 'Vista' so you know which one not to delete and click OK. Now right-click again and this time choose Shrink Volume.

The amount you're prompted to enter is the amount the drive will be shrunk by, meaning it's the space you'll have left over for XP. So if you want to create a 25GB partition for XP, enter 25600 in the box (25,600MB = 25GB) and click Shrink.

02. It's all in the preparation
Once your drive has been shrunk successfully, you should see a new unallocated area appear in the lower pane.

Right-click on the block and choose New Basic Partition from the pop-up menu. Accept the default values in the Wizard that appears, but when prompted for a label enter 'XP' and tick the Quick Format checkbox.

This step isn't strictly necessary - Windows Setup has no problem installing on unallocated space - but by providing a drive label you're a lot less likely to make the classic mistake of targeting the wrong partition. Doing this would wipe the Vista installation. While there are plenty of warnings before formatting begins, people do make this mistake.

03. Install XP SP2
Fetch your dog-eared XP box, put the installation disk into your optical drive and reboot your PC, making sure you boot from the XP disk rather than from Vista. Windows Setup will now run.

Once you've hit Enter to begin the XP installation, you'll be presented with a list of hard drive partitions - one of which will be labelled as 'Vista', one as 'XP' (the former identified by Step 1, the latter by step 2).

Highlight the XP entry in the list and press Enter to choose it as the target partition.
Setup will begin copying files, and after a short while will launch the familiar graphical portion of the process where you'll be asked to configure various aspects of the install.

04. Restore Vista
Once the installation has completed and you've finished reminiscing over the familiar look and feel of XP, you'll no doubt be shocked to find there's no option to start Vista when you reboot. And while you can still see all your files in Windows Explorer, there's no way to load anything but the older operating system because XP has overwritten Vista's boot loader. Don't panic.

To fix this, insert your Vista installation disc and boot from it. When the initial setup screen appears, click Next and then choose Repair in the lower-left.

Highlight Vista's entry in the System Recovery Options list, click Next, and then choose the Startup Repair option.

05. The boot menu
Now when you restart, Vista will load correctly - but annoyingly there's now no option to choose XP. What you need to do is update the PC's boot configuration file so that when the machine starts you're presented with a menu which allows you to choose which operating system to load.

Download EasyBCD from www.neosmart.net, install and then run it. Click the Add/Remove Entries button on the left, choose the drive letter associated with your XP partition and Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3 in the drop-down menu. Hit the Add button and then Save.

Reboot and you can now choose between both XP and Vista.

A WARNING ABOUT XP
Once you've created your new partition and have installed XP, be sure to remember that each time you install new software you choose the drive letter associated with XP and not with Vista.

For most users that means choosing D: as the target drive for new software - if you choose C: by mistake, whatever you're installing will end up on the original Vista partition instead. Remember to keep things separate, as it makes backups easier and you'll have an easier untangling problems should the need ever arise.

Huh?
XP SP2 is an abbreviation of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. You should use an SP2 CD for all installations, as without it XP is unlikely to recognise modern storage controllers and thus won't be able see your hard drive.

A partition is just an area of your hard drive dedicated to a particular purpose and is accessed as a single unit by the operating system. These are typically accessed through a drive letter. While you can install more than one operating systems in the same partition, don't. There are 1,024 megabytes (MB) in every gigabyte (GB), so if you want to convert from GB to MB you multiply by 1,024. To convert from MB to GB divide.

NeoSmart EasyBCD is one of the better utilities that help Vista users tweaking their boot loader settings and is essential when dual booting with XP.

Questions, questions

Vista Repair doesn't work and it keeps loading XP.

Answer: There's a small chance the Startup Repair option within Vista Repair won't work. In which case, you'll need to choose Command Prompt instead and type:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

This should solve the problem.

Can't I make XP use drive C: instead?

Answer: No.

How do I put everything back the way it was?

Answer: Run EasyBCD and remove the Windows XP entry. Return to Disk Management, right-click on the partition you created and choose Delete Volume. Right-click the Vista partition and choose Extend to reclaim the space.

How can I make XP's partition bigger?

Answer: Boot Vista, open the Management console, and right-click on the XP partition under the Storage node. Extend the partition as you did in Step 1.

Phil Wand