Hello, going to dual boot xp pro 64 and Vista business on one drive. Gonna do XP first and will split drive pretty evenly into two partitions. I know that the first drive is going to be primary but when i go to disk management to assign the 2nd partition for the vista install, does that also have to be primary or can it be extended? I have never done a dual boot and am doing it as an experiment and interest i suppose. Any Help would be appreciated. Thank you Tony Tony--Florida

I used Acronis Disk Director to partition and from memory I'm pretty sure both have to be primary as the drive letter will flip between C & E (assuming you have one DVD drive as D) depending on which OS you boot into. C is Vista when you boot into Vista and C is XP when you boot into XP - hopefully you see what I mean. Therefore both partitions have to be able to support an operating system.

Just make the xp the primary and install it. Let vista do what it wants. I'd guess it will make a secondary primary. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10