Verifying this will work...

Again, as others have said, thanks for keeping everyone up to speed with all the questions being asked - no small task!

I have a new system pre-installed with Vista Basic. According to the Disk Management, my single 250GB HD goes like this:

1st partition: EISA Config (15MB)
2nd partition: Recovery Partition (D:\) (10GB)
3rd partition: Vista OS (C:\) (233GB)


If I've disabled the auto-recovery features of Vista (how do I know I've totally, and completely done this?) , can I blow away that 2nd partition (D:\), and install XP on that 10GB partition? Will there be any wierd issues with having the D:\ drive sit before the C:\ drive on the physical disk?

Lastly, it appears that the /ntldr directory which normally sits with the XP installation, is written to the C:\ partition (where Vista is, the Active-Partition) Correct? This is why some posters asked, "why am I having the Vista Boot Loader boot XP from the C:\ drive, when it's actually on the D:\ drive?"