Installing Windows Vista as Dual Boot with XP

If you're anything like myself you're probably very cautious before installing a new version of the operating system, and would probably rather try it out first in a "sandboxed" environment before attempting to move all of your apps and data over and crossing your fingers that it will all work without any major glitches. Guided by a similar sentiment I decided that the best way for me to try out Vista would be to create a dual boot system, where Vista and XP coexist happily, and even share most of my data. This seemed simple enough until I tried it. If you're reading this post you probably already know that Vista has a nasty tendency to hijack the MBR and offer its own "dual boot" solution giving you the option to boot into the "old operating system". It even goes as far as placing files on the partition housing XP which will prevent you from booting directly from that partition. There are many articles out there descirbing how you can salvage the trampled MBR and get things going again, as well as explanations why Vista does what it does. However, I tend to like having things my way, and I had a different plan for how my dual boot will work.

First, I found what I consider the best boot loader and partition manager utility out there called BootIt NG. You can get it from TeraByte here for about $35 (which will be the best $35 you've ever spent). You can get an evaluation version first to play around with. This handy tool comes with all sorts of handy features. Among other things it can create, manage, move, resize your partitions; boot any OS from any partition on any hard drive; edit the MBR on the fly during the boot up sequence, so that each OS can have its own view of your partition layout.

Armed with this swiss army knife, you can now prepare to install Vista on a machine that already has XP on some partition. What you need to do is create an empty partion for Vista, but before you proceed to install the OS you will have to use BootIt to trick Vista's installer into believing that there is no other OS installed on your machine. To do this you choose "Partition Work" and select Edit MBR. Once, there you remove all partition except for the one you intend to install Vista on. Don't worry, you're not actually removing the partions, but only information about them in MBR, and you can easily add them right back once Vista is installed. After you save your changes, you can reboot your box and load up Vista's installer from the CD. When it loads it will find only its own blank partition, and no information about any existing systems on other partitions, and consequently will not attempt to mess with anything but its own designated partion. That's exactly what you want.

Once Vista happily installs, you simply go back to BootIt, and edit MBR again, sticking any other partions back in as needed, and voila you've got yourself a dual boot machine, without Vista's clunky dual boot solution.