XP fails in first step of installation
 

Thanks William for the wonderful notes on dual boot.

I have a basic problem here. I am a newbie. Please elaborate on any answers that you post on this question.

I have Vista Home Premium pre installed.
I have successfully partitioned my 160 gigs of hdd into 3. One of them is named as XP F:
I went into setup screen and gave the priority of CD as "Primary" boot loader.
On booting the system got CD of XP SP2 correctly...
I got a message as "Press Enter" to set up Windows... which I did...

However, this is the last message that I got and I need to quit installation of XP... got unsuccessful here:



Windows XP Professional Setup:
Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer.
Make sure any hdd are powered on and properly connected to your computer and that any disk related hardware configuration is correct.
This may involve running a manufacturer supplied diagnostic or setup problem.

Setup cannot continue. To quit set up Press F3.

Please Help !!!

Many Thanks.

as posted a couple of comments back, try this first.

Boot Options not Loading Windows XP
 

Hello William, Thanks for the tutorial.

I have 2 Drives with 3 paritions each.

Before Vista, I had XP Home on "C" and XP Pro on "D". I clean installed Vista on C, and after installation it stopped showing PRO, so I followed your steps. everything was OK, but as when i try to load XP from start up, it doesnt and gives error.

is there anything that I needed to change in the code? or do I have to re-install windows XP. as i have installed Windows VISTA in a C drive, and keeping XP PRO
as it was in Drive D (of second Drive).

Thanks for the tutorial
after finishing all 4 steps, I can dual boot into both vista and xp
but XP cannot detect my audio card and some other hardware properly...
even installing drivers cannot be succeed...
any thoughts that can help?
THANKS!

DVD/CD rom erased!
 

I've made a dual boot system but in the process my D: dirve which used to be my DVD/CD drive seems to be overwritten. I noticed that from your screen shoots you seem to have the same set up. When I boot in vista the E: drive is partitioned for XP but my D: drive is still not visibale. If I boot to XP the D: drive is associated with my XP os system so there is no dvd/cd drive visable there either. I would try to change the path of my dvd/cd drive in the Vista disk manger but as I said vista is not displaying that as a drive anymore. Do you have a fix for this problem?

both of these last 2 posts: Biuyau and Unregistered, have nothing to do with a dual boot. Both OS will have individual setups, so if there are problems with XP, it is only XP and is isolated from Vista.

Primary Partition
 

I am trying to install Win XP on my new Dell with a Vista OS. I partitioned my hard drive but can't get it to become a primary. There are already 3 primary partitions. One is Vista(C), one is recovery(D) and the other is labeled EISA config.(no drive letter) and we can't change that one. Do you know if we can change the recovery partition or the EISA to something other then primary? The recovery partition is something that DELL installed at factory and they don't recommend it being changed.

Thanks for your help.

dell creates these partitions in case of emergencies to allow for easy booting and re-installations.
Primary (active) partitions are on the front of a drive, and cannot be changed unless moved elsewhere on the drive... which is more difficult than it sounds.

try this:
shrink the logical partition, and add the space to your vista or recovery partition. Then use this to create a new primary partition. Vista should not have a max limit on primary partitions, even if it does, it should be more than 6.

Portable Hard Drive
 

So after failing to get my partition problem solved I decided to load win xp on my portable hard drive and run it from there but when i try to download it to the portable hard drive i get a message saying i already have a newer version of windows and can't download this one. Any ideas on how I can get it installed on my portable hard drive?

Thanks

the problem that i have is ive done all the steps up to installing xp. the problem is that when i go to install it doesnt detect any hard drives and only option is to exit. is it because im running raid for all my drives?raid 1 = 2x160 gig and raid 2 = 2x250 gig.