[audiosapien]

sorry if the title is confusing and weird i am new to dual booting.

i am running on vista currently it came installed with my computer but i also have a second hard drive which i formatted using vista.

so it is now empty and usable?

i tried to boot from disk my XP install CD to install XP on the spare hard drive but received a blue screen error.


A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

check for viruses on your computer. remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. check your hard drive to make sure it it properly configured and terminated. run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.


sorry if this is confusing if there is anyway you would like me to clarify i would be more than glad to. any information is greatly appreciated, thank you for all your help.

[Byrone4807]

I am sure that you have to partition your drives before you can dual boot. You just cant add a hard drive and install an OS that way. you would have to shut off your computer, unplug one hard drive and plug in the other inside the cabinet. Also to partition your going to have to do a clean install of both. I would suggest if you want to try this get a new hard drive and maintain your old hard drive intact, for your first try at it.

[TheOutcaste]

Actually you can just plug in a 2nd drive and install an OS onto it. Only problem with installing XP after Vista is it overwrites the Vista boot loader. You have to repair the Vista boot loader before you can boot back into Vista, then you have to manually add XP to the Vista boot menu.
There's a sticky at the top of this forum about that, and here is another article that shows how to use Easy BCD to fix things.
If you remove the Vista drive and install XP, you'll have modify the boot.ini file so XP will boot as well as adding it to the Vista bootloader. And in that case, each OS will see it's drive as Drive C and the other as Drive D, which may be good or bad. If you think you might want to remove Vista at some point and keep XP, this does have an advantage though, as the XP startup files will already be on that hard drive.

It would help if you can post the actual stop error message, including all the numbers and any file names that are mentions. What you posted was just the things to try.

Common problems:
Using an XP disk that does not include SP2 on a system that has PCI Express slots. It will give a blue screen.
If the XP disk does not have at least SP1, it will only be able to see 137 GB of the drive.
If you are installing onto a SATA drive, you'll either need to change the BIOS setting for the SATA controller to ATA mode (which may cause problems with the Vista install) or slipstream the SATA drivers into a new CD (If your system has a floppy disk drive, you can provide the driver on a floppy during the install)
Newer systems may not have XP drivers for all the hardware. You may find you have no sound, or limited Graphics capability. Best to track down all the needed drivers before hand.