dual booting vista and xp

S

spazz31585

New Member
I recently got an Acer T180 from a friend of mine
It came with windows vista home basic. But i want the option of using XP also.
I have a XP disc and an unused product key for XP, but I don't have a Vista disc.
I have run across several tutorial's online about dual booting the two, but everyone i have found so far states that I will need the Vista disc.
1: is there a way to create a vista disc since vista is already installed?
2: is there a way to dual boot without the vista disc?
3: would i even be able to run XP on this system? i am having trouble with the Acer support site and haven't been able to look at the drivers or the manual for this comp. does anyone know if there are XP drivers even available for this system?
 
spazz31585 said:
I recently got an Acer T180 from a friend of mine
It came with windows vista home basic. But i want the option of using XP also.
I have a XP disc and an unused product key for XP, but I don't have a Vista disc.
I have run across several tutorial's online about dual booting the two, but everyone i have found so far states that I will need the Vista disc.
1: is there a way to create a vista disc since vista is already installed?
2: is there a way to dual boot without the vista disc?
3: would i even be able to run XP on this system? i am having trouble with the Acer support site and haven't been able to look at the drivers or the manual for this comp. does anyone know if there are XP drivers even available for this system?
Click to expand...

1. Perhaps - You may have a restore partition on that computer (most commercial computers do) and Acer may also have some sort of Recovery Disk maker software. Have a look through your applications or on Acer's website for such a utility. Now, this is all under the assumption that you have the original OS that came with the computer and that the recovery partition is still intact. If not, then no, you can't make a Vista restore disk without resorting to a complete backup program.

2. Yes - follow the guide posted above.

3. Yes - If you go to Acer's website under support, you can dowload the XP drivers.
 
i dual boot vista and xp. i installed xp first then vista. what i did was to create a partition using a third party software then load the 2nd OS cd then install it in the newly created partition. what im saying is that to install the 2nd OS, you dont need the CD for the first OS, the one that is already installed. at least that is true for my case.
 
just thought i'd let ya'll know, i made some progress.
managed to get xp installed finally. but had to manually set the active partition each time i wanted to change OS's.

then i messed up.
i removed XP in hopes of trying installing it again and making it work right.
now the computer won't even let me install XP at all.
when it restarts to complete the install, i get an error about an invalid configuration!!!

so, still no success yet. if anyone has any tips, please let me know.
 
ok, here's the deal.

finally got xp and vista both installed again.
both work wonderfully
i generally use xp more because its not as much of a resource hog.

the problem i have though, if i want to use vista at all, i have to actually mark the vista partition as active and reboot.

i have tried using the EasyBCD in order to make the boot menu, but with no success. the only OS i can boot to is the one that i manually mark as active.

it's not too bad since i use XP most of the time, but i would really like to be able to boot to vista without going through so much hassle.

anyone have any ideas? anyone know of any free software that will help with this?
 
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