I have purchased a new 500 g hard drive and I want to be able to dual boot between vista and xp, any where I look it tells you how to do it but it has either vista or xp anready installed. I wish to do a clean install. Any help welcomed or is there a site that tell you what to do. David

I was going to ask why, but I decided not to, I've been holding off on Vista because of a couple of compatability things that affect my work, but I'm not sure I'd bother dual booting if I did upgrade.

It should just be a question of installing one then the other, I'd rcomend using seperate partitions, but with older versions of windows this wasn't strictly necessary.

Personally I'd install Vista second, because it'll likely do the right thing and install a boot loader so you can boot XP, I'm not sure the XP install would be as friendly with vista.

You may not be able to use a vista upgrade install to do this, but I haven't tried.

It should be noted that there were issues dual booting some versions of windows 2000 and XP for example, if you installed them on the same partition you could get it working but installing some software would install files in shared locations and leave one of the OS's hosed.

The other way to do it is install one as a virtual machine using VMware or virtual box


But Why want to ? Either run one or the other.
Vista sucks -- it is slow unless either you throw 8 gb of memory at it or turn the feature settings down so it has less bling than than xp.

As said, install XP then Vista, just make sure you choose different a directory for each system if putting both on the same partition.
There is a lot to be said for using a Virtual machine instead though, but whatever you run on the VM will be slower than the base system, so choose the least used OS for the VM.

Cheers
Alex
PS
I'm running Vista on 1Gb mem quite happily although it is not a huge improvement (none at all some would say ) on XP if I'm honest about it

Tks. lads for your input. davy