Tallon41
Said..
It is called Dual Booting, and the answer is "Yes, but..."
there is always a "but" hunh? LOL
The "oldest" OS has to be install first, and on a seperate partition, so you'd have to first "shrink" the Vista partition to make room for the XP OS...*if* you are going to use a single-drive dual-booting. Personally I do not recommend single-drive dual-booting at all. I recommend 2 seperate drives with the different OS installed. Recap; get a 2nd Hard drive, disconnect your Vista drive, (power AND data,) then connect the new drive to the same connection on the motherboard the other drive was using. Install XP, so you would need to make DARN sure you HAVE XP drivers for all your 'system' devices...or this is pointless from the start, as it may not boot. Once XP is installed, reconnect the Vista disk, but to any unused connector, (leave the XP disk alone.) Put in Vista disk and restart, need to boot from the CD, (may have to change BIOS to boot CD first,) Press any key when the prompt to do so appears. When the Vista language screen appears, press -Next-. On the next screen, click on the -Repair computer- link. The Vista installation should be selected, click -Next-. It should not detect any problems, and then display a list of recovery tools. The command prompt tool is needed. The Bcdedit command can be used, (other 3rd party 'boot loader' programs are out there as well,) to alter boot order of OS. typing BCDEDIT /? will display help, or you can google the command for ins on it's use. Once you've made the necessary entries for the XP OS, then you're ready to boot-up !