I 've installed Linux and Windows XP for dual boot before but I've never installed XP with Vista. It was a bit of a head scratcher ar first, not knowing why you are not able to see your pre installed Vista after the XP was installed.
Initially, i created a second partition for the XP but decided to try to restore a partition image of Windows XP using Norton Ghost instead of installing XP from scratch. Click here, click there, and in about 10 minutes the ghost image was successfully restored. Funny thing was, during the restoration process the time remaining continued to countdown til the number was negative.
Strange..but nevetheless the restoration was a success. Rebooted the machine and the dual boot option came up...unfortunately upon selecting Windows XP it went back to reboot the machine. Since this method required alot more troubleshooting; what with all the dealing with ntldr, booting back to vista and setting the bootloader and etc..I decided to install XP from scratch. When trying to setup however this message came out:
Back to square one. Luckily, in this era, the era of technology, the wonders of the internet has enabled us to explore the wide options of resources out there on the web. After reading through some good forums and blogs...here's the deal:
The SATA operation on the DELL laptop I was working on had SATA Operation on AHCI. Set this to ATA to enable XP to recognize the harddisk, and in order for this to be possible, the Flash Cache Module had to be switched off as well. and Walla! Setup for XP was possible again :) After the setup was completed, there was no dual boot screen and it simply boot straight to Windows XP. This is what is supposed to happen. All we need to do is to restore the Vista bootloader so Vista can be recognised again. End of story. Happy ending. Oh yes, here's one of the good links on How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista pre-installed) :
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