After upgrading my computer from Windows XP to Windows Vista Home Premium a number of programs no longer work or do not work as well as they did on Windows Vista. Is it possible to run both Windows XP and Vista on the one computer? I plan to add a second internal hard drive for this purpose. However, I have no idea how to setup such a dual-boot system.

Dual-booting between Windows versions (or even other operating systems, such as Linux and Windows) is possible. In fact, you don’t even need two separate hard drives to accomplish this feat (although there is nothing wrong with using two hard drives). That said, we will deal with the situation where you can use two separate hard drives, since that is the direction which you seem to be going towards, but we will also pass comment on how the same can be accomplished by using only one hard drive.

First, have a read over the instructions on the APC website: apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm . This provides an excellent tutorial on how to dual-boot Windows XP and Windows Vista on one computer, with either having Windows XP or Windows Vista installed as the first operating system. The tutorial deals with installing Windows XP onto the same physical hard drive as Windows Vista. As such, this includes instructions to create free space on the Windows Vista hard drive to allow the installation of Windows XP. You can skip this step as you will be installing Windows XP onto a completely separate hard drive which has been installed in the system. The article concludes with installing Windows XP and then modifying the Windows Vista boot loader so that a menu appears on boot allowing you to select the operating system which needs to be booted.

Be aware, there are quite a few things that you need to do in preparation for the dual-boot setup, particularly printing the instructions from the APC website and also creating an EasyBCD boot CD so you can modify the Windows Vista boot loader. Therefore, you should read through the entire article and do all the preparatory steps before launching.

The article details how you can install both Windows XP and Windows Vista on the one physical hard drive. This requires you to re-partition the hard drive so that Windows XP has one partition and Windows Vista has a separate partition. Repartitioning is usually a destructive process, resulting in all data on the affected hard drive being lost. However, there are ways to non-destructively repartition. The APC article suggests using a Linux-based utility called GParted. This is a bootable CD which allows you to nondestructively repartition the hard drive. However, if you do decide to go down this path then I strongly suggest that you backup all data on your computer before proceeding. While nondestructive repartitioning does not affect the data on your computer in theory, sometimes things can go awry. In particular, if you misconfigure the repartitioning, you could render the computer unbootable or, even worse, destroy the partitioning table and the data on the drive.

Do not let these warnings dissuade you from attempting a dual-boot system. After reading over the article you will probably find that it is fairly straight-forward to setup such a system and find that it is actually quite a useful way to operate if you need both Windows XP and Windows Vista running on one computer for compatibility purposes.