I had no problem at all installing XP alongside a pre-installed Vista on my HP nc6320 laptop. On the other hand, I get stuck right from the start, when I try to do the same thing on a Dell Inspiron 6400. When I reach the point where XP installer asks where the XP partition should be located and I select an unallocated area (same problem appears even if I create and format an empty partition beforehand and select it), I get the following error message : “To install Windows XP on the selected partition, installation program must copy certain boot files on Disk 0 with ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]. However, this disk does not contain a partition compatible with Windows XP”. I don’t know whether this has to do with the SATA disk. On the HP, I disabled SATA Native Support in the BIOS and everything went fine. In the Dell Bios, I found no equivalent option. How can I create a “compatible partition” ?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...

From what I gathered up to now, there's a specific technical problem with Dell which I will have to investigate with them.

I suggest you should allocate the space where you would like to install XP within Windows Vista first and then attempt to install XP. The reason is that Vista allocates the spaces differently from XP and once Vista allocates spaces, you can not allocate any more space with XP. So I do not know how you allocated space in HP. Maybe HP partitions HDD with partition tools similar to those supplied with XP. If Dell uses partition tools in Vista, you can not create any other partitions with XP. If you start partitioning HDD with Vista, your XP partition tools will not work. I tried it. And it did not work. Regards SuatCINI

Further to my explanation above, please see the following MS Knowledgebase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931... Regards SuatCINI

Actually installing xp after vista makes a problem, Vista will stop working while xp only boots. Because Vista has a different booting system, so you have to install windows xp at first then install Windows vista, both will work in dual boot. of course you have to install each one in a different partition.

Mo7y is right. I proceeded as follows : I moved the Vista partition to an external disk, installed Xp in a new partition and moved the Vista partition back. I created a normal dual boot environment by fiddling around with the EasyBCD options. Everything works perfectly. On the way I lost the Media Center feature, but who cares. Media Center can be replaced by a normal PowerDVD and a DVD burner software. Instead of clicking on the key you click on an icon.