This is how I dual. (aka. The Way I Dual Booted to XP on a Vista machine)
Ok so I took some short cuts. I wouldn’t say this is the best way to do this but I was desperate so I didn’t care too much. Besides it all worked out in the end.
I wanted to dual boot to XP so I could play games. I get about 10-15 frames per second better on Team Fortress 2 in XP than I do in Vista. For months I tired and the problem I had was I couldn’t use the Vista disk manager to shrink the Vista partition enough. As you can see that’s only about 1GB of space which is not enough for XP and games.
I tried a variety of defragmenters to see if that would give me more space. I also tried deleting all my temp files and the pagefile because supposedly those are what prevent the disk manager from shrinking the partition. None of that worked so eventually I turned to Gparted. I was pretty sure this would break my Vista installation and I was right. I used Gparted to shrink the Vista partition by 15GBs and the next time I booted I went into Vista’s startup recovery.
Here’s the cool thing, Vista’s Startup Recovery searched and repaired errors for about 20 minutes, found all the problems with the installation and set it back straight. I thought for sure I was up the creek because I didn’t have an install disk. All I did have was Vista’s repair disk. However on the next boot it did a disk check, found no errors, rebooted and loaded up Vista minus 15GB of space.
Now I got to work installing XP. That went just as expected. I booted to the XP install disk, installed XP in the 15GB of unpartitioned space and it booted right up when I was done. At this point I realized it would’ve been a good idea to get the XP drivers for my laptop ahead of time. My network card didn’t even come up. Luckily I knew where the Vista drivers were stored and that worked for my network card (nothing else). So I was able to get online at dell.com and download all the other drivers I needed.
So now I have a laptop that boots into XP. I booted to Vista Repair Disk I had and choose Startup Repair. That reset it to boot into Vista. Once I was in Vista again I used EasyBCD to create another boot entry. When I was in EasyBCD I went to Add/Remove Entries choose the drive letter of the XP install, choose Windows NT/2K/XP/2k3, gave it a name, clicked Add Entry, and then save.
I got luckily that Vista’s Startup Recovery was able to piece the drive back together after using Gparted, but if you don’t have a lot on your Vista machine see if it works for you. Just make sure you have a recovery disk or a disk image. It’s a heck of a lot less time consuming than trying to defragment and rearrange your drive so you can use Vista partition shrink tool. It seems counter intuitive that Microsoft would finally give a built in system for shrinking a drive just to make it hard to shrink a Vista partition because of the placement of important files. But that’s exactly what happened (I think?).
I know I didn’t got into a lot of detail here. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this. Most recommend using the Vista Disk Manager to shrink the volume. I’m not going to list the tutorial I followed because it was the worst website I’ve every seen. Not that it wasn’t pretty but because it took forever to load and crashed Firefox a bunch of times. If anyone needs help or wants the tutorial I referenced then leave a comment and I’ll hook you up. With that said use this method at your own risk and I’m not liable for any data loss or damages. Sincerely, The Nite Tech.
Links:
Gparted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
EasyBCD: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
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