I created an partition and assigned it the letter F and made it a NTFS drive. I set it to "Active" partition so it would boot from it, but everytime I restart comp and try too, it won't. I wanted to install XP, but it won't boot the F:\ drive (which makes it C:\), but instead, it boots to Vista C and leaves F intact.

That's not how things work - Drive C and the first partition of every subsequent HDDs are the only ones that can - and should - be designated as Active. This is by BIOS design. Any deviate to it will cause the machine to not boot like the one you have just described. i_XpUser

You have been misinformed XpUser. You can have multiple hard drives set active. John, you will not be able to boot the F: drive until you install an OS on it. I don't think you will be able to install XP on it. For dual booting, earlier versions of windows must be installed before later versions. You could check on the internet to see if you can find a workaround. There is one to install win98 after win xp but I haven't seen one to install XP after Vista.

I don't think I'm misinformed. What is Primary partition? The first division of a hard disk drive. The primary partition is often the only one on the disk, and it occupies the entire disk volume. If there are multiple partitions, the primary partition is the one that holds the operating system and has to be made "active" in order to do so The same principle applies to multiple HDDs. i_XpUser

I'm afraid that you are misreading that XpUser. It doesn't say anything about not being able to have active partitions on other drives. On the system I am running now, I have two hard drives with active partitions. You need two active partitions if you have a machine with dual OSs. Each OS needs an active partition

You can set more than one partition active but you just can't do more than one from a physical disk. Furthermore, in order to boot from any partition, the partition must be set active since the MBR will reside on that partition that is also sometimes referred to as the "system" partition.