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If you have a new laptop with Vista installed and want to install XP as well, as there are some programs that won’t run with Vista at the moment which you still need to run. I believe there are some people facing this kind of problem quite frequently. Well, it is possible to dual-boot, or even triple-boot, Vista and other Windows operating systems. But, note that you need to install in the oldest operating system first. Thus, you could theoretically install Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista in that order, and all would be well - obviously, each OS would need its own partition.

In this case, with Windows Vista already installed, you can either blow the installation away, install XP, leaving part of the hard disk as free space to be formatted and used by Vista when you install that, or you could try to install XP while Vista is already installed, but I don’t really recommend that since you probably won’t have two partitions.

If you do go ahead anyway, what you’ll discover is that when your system restarts you’ll have lost access to Vista. This is because Vista uses a different Boot Configuration Database (BCD) store. When you install XP, the setup program overwrites the Master Boot Record (MBR), the boot sector and the boot files.

HASTA LA VISTA - BABY!

Interestingly, you can actually recover from this. You need to restore the Vista MBR and transfer control to its boot code. To do that, take a look at this Microsoft Knowledge Base article and follow the steps outlined there. So you are flying solo now at Windows Vista no longer start.

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