I foolishly installed Windows Vista RC2 Build 4755 on my computer and overwrote my XP installation (along with all my files, long story) I didn’t mind because I had stuff backed up. Vista is fine no problems so far except the fact that NVIDIA drivers don’t work very well (sometimes not at all) with Windows Vista. I have tried older versions of drivers, registry tweaks to no avail. So I am left with one choice make a partition on my HDD (about 30GB or so of my 120GB) but the snag is that PartitionMagic and Partition Manager are not compatible with Windows Vista (I am not trying the Compatibility Wizard either).

I found an alternative in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. I make a 30GB partition, reboot my PC with the XP disc installed and it unpacks everything, creates the file system (NTFS, which takes about 50 minutes) but when Windows is installed and the computer reboots it gets stuck at the “Verifying DMI Data Pool” screen and won’t budge.

Even when I tell the computer to boot from HDD-1 it still doesn’t load past this screen and I eventually have to boot from my Vista CD and then repair my installation. When Vista loads up then the partition is visible in My Computer and there is a “WINDOWS” directory but nothing else. I have used a legit copy of XP and the “Barely Naked” version and the same problem crops up with both installs.

I’ve been told its possible to install XP on the same logical drive as Vista but its not advised so I am not going to attempt faith.

What am I doing wrong?

What you *should* have done was kept your XP installation intact & installed Vista on a different parttiton, creating a dual boot setup.

AFAIK, there is only ONE nVidia driver that supports Vista. I don't know what other versions you're trying to use?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvis...

If you're not concerned about losing any files, reformat your HDD again & create at least two partitions, then install WinXP on C:. Once you've got XP up & running, pop in the Vista CD (don't boot off it, pop it in while in XP). Let Vista auto-start. Do NOT upgrade XP...instead, select 'Advanced' & let it install into the 2nd partition.

"I’ve been told its possible to install XP on the same logical drive as Vista but its not advised so I am not going to attempt faith."

If you do that without first renaming your (Windows) XP folder to something else like WinXP prior to loading Vista, it WILL get chucked as Windows.old after Vista is done taking over essentially what it needs from it to make its own Windows folder.

Hello.

XP should be installed first and Vista, last.

What you can do now is, install Vista over itself, over the C: partition. XP is on D: partition.

Your dual boot system will work.

Regards

suatcini

Yeah see this is where a second hard drive comes in handy for testing Beta's. That what I do. I have a second hard drive strictly for beta testing.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI