2 Years ago, my Dell Studio laptop was shipped with Vista. Honestly, I was never terribly upset by Vista's performance except for its software incompatibilities for many major enterprise applications, at least w.r.t what I use. However, I tried to manage to install some of the applications like OBIEE, Teradata and Informatica (7.1 and 8.6), but with much effort involved with some tweaks and tricks. Luckily, Oracle had released Vista and Windows 7 compatible Oracle 10g Database which I used as Database platform for many applications.

For sometime, I even used XP in VM and used it for some R&D stuff - trying out different Oracle versions, and many others applications, but it was mainly used for very quick, R&D, referencing works but not for using it long hours. Reason being, VM was terribly slow on my Intel Centrino 4GB RAM laptop with Vista as Host OS!!

I had preferred XP as standalone OS that in VM, but XP can't (an older version) be installed easily with dual booting besides to Vista (which is a newer windows version). At one point I even wanted to wipe-off my Vista and install XP on laptop, but I wanted to continue as my warranty was still there, and there are bunch of softwares in Vista that me and my wife use and also I found it difficult to take backup of 320 Gig data.

Now, I couldn't hold it any longer. I finally ventured to install XP beside to Vista with dual booting. Steps you can follow...

I had only 1 partition (C:\ drive) with 300G and that was Vista's home. Dell shipped it that way. Of that, I wanted to allocate 50G specifically for XP.

1. So, I cleared some free space in C:\ and defragmented with free space optmization so all the available freespace on C: comes to tail end of it.
For this, I tried to use Windows Disk Defragmentor but that didn't help. One important reason being that system files can't be moved by Windows Defragmentor. So, use a third party defragmenting sofware - I used PerfectDisk - it works great. You need to disable Hibernation and Paging and do boot enabled defragmentation in PerfectDisk so that all the system files also would get moved.

2. Use the Windows Disk Management (under Computer Mangement) and shrink the C: drive and specify the size how much you want to shrink. In my case I wanted to shrink it from 300G to 250G. Doing so will leave 50G space as raw non-partitioned file system.

3. You need to create a new logical drive (D: in my case) using the 50G free space.

Install Windows XP with using a bootable CD (I used my XP SP3 CD). Here a challenge blows out. During the installation, while file copying in progress and even before accepting License Agreement, machine goes into blue screen. Problem here is, the recent HDD are SATA enabled, and Windows XP does not usually come with SATA drivers and XP does not recognize your HDD and hence the blue screen.

There are difference ways doing this-
1. Use a bootable floppy having SATA drivers and at the start of XP installation press F6 so it picks the drivers from Floppy disk. This F6Floppy option does not work for me as mine is laptop and floppy diskette is out of discussion. There seem a workaround using USB drive for Floppy drive, however I didn't try that.

2. Slipstreaming the SATA drivers using nLite. You can burn a bootable XP CD by integrating the SATA drivers that downloaded from vendor website. This link will help how to proceed with this step further.
Unfortunately, I have a problem with my CD/DVD writer and couldn't burn a new disk. So, I finally ventured with 3 option as described below. In nutshell, here I install XP first with compatible drivers and update the drivers to SATA and then re-enable HDD for SATA.

3. Go to BIOS setup and change HDD type from SATA to IDE.

4. Proceed with XP installation - there will not be any blue screen as IDE drivers are known to typical XP software bundle.

Here, there would be 2 issues you need to fix:

a)
- Note that when you install XP, already existing Vista's bootloader gets lost which means your machine behaves as if there is only one operating system to boot and directly boots up from XP, without even showing up dual boot menu at startup.
- So, let it first boot using XP, then use software like EasyBCD to recover the lost Vista boot record. With EasyBCD, you need to search for boot record available in C: drive (Vista home in my case) and add that to existing boot loader. You can get more details here. Doing this enabled Dual boot for Vista and XP.

b)
Another issue is re-enabling SATA. If I don't do this, Vista would not work - it blue screens out :). So, go to device manager and update the HDD drivers using the SATA drivers you have or downloaded. There are some cool instructions here on how to do this.

5. At this point your XP know how to support both SATA and IDE. So, restart the machine with SATA enabled back this time in the BIOS setup.

6. You should now be able to boot from XP as well as Vista

If anyone wants to give whole thing a try, and if you think I can be of any help, let me know...

Karteek