Best way to dual boot between Vista and XP Pro on X61T

[pboneal]

My X61T came with Vista preinstalled and I now have the recovery cd's for XP Pro and would like to set it up to dual boot. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Pul

[ducky2802]

If youre thinking of dual booting using the same license which is embedded in the machine, you can easily render one of your OS's unusable. You need two licenses to do this (at least what I have seen with a clean install of vista on an xp thinkpad). I could easily be wrong, but I think you need another license to dual boot and using to different os product recovery discs is not sufficient since they dont actually have a license on them.

[pboneal]

I am confused. My tablet came with Vista preinstalled and also shipped with XP recovery cd's in the box. That gives me the option to use either one. I should be able to use either and I don't understand why it would make it unusable.

Thanks

[ryengineer]

My X61T came with Vista preinstalled and I now have the recovery cd's for XP Pro and would like to set it up to dual boot. Any help would be appreciated.....snip

Recovery disks contain an OEM factory image that wipes out your HDD before installation so only one OS can be set at a time via them.

[pboneal]

My thinking is that I could use an image capture tool for the existing Vista install and the use the XP recovery discs to create a new install and capture that install and the use both instances and dual boot from them.

Any thoughts on that?

[ryengineer]

I can't offer any (good) piece of advise since I have never done it via recovery disks but I've an idea that even if it were possible then you might had run into problems for having two hidden partitions at once on the HDD.

Also, according to downgrade terms you're allowed to use one eligible OS at a time only, you need another license to run (dual boot) addition OS of your choice on the same system.

[pboneal]

I actually have plenty of licenses. I have an action pack from MS.

[j-dawg]

I would recommend trying a clean install of Vista with SP1 before jumping back to XP. I'm assuming you havne't already done this; perhaps you've already tried Vista and decided you didn't like it, but a clean install with SP1 is quite snappy on my machine. It's worth a shot--I am not planning on going back to XP any time soon.

[ducky2802]

well, if you have the licenses available, it SHOULD be possible if you change the license/product key in the registry because as soon as you install the os it pulls the info from the bios. However, something I forgot and ryengineer picked up is that the oem install doesnt like partitions as all, and if you partition your hdd, unless you are really lucky, itll wipe the things clean every time you install the os. So, Im not sure if you can even use the oem discs to install two on top of each other.... I think you need a physical vista/xp disc and one of your licenses.