Had a situation where a dual boot on a Dell laptop was an option. Never done it before but figured no better time to dive in. Never ceases to amaze me how naive I can still be.

Laptop came with Vista installed and I needed to get XP on it. I have learned that there's two ways to do this. One is very easy, one gets complicated and you really do not know which path you can take until you begin the process. Easy way? Put in the genuine XP CD, reboot the machine, go into the BIOS and set up the CD to be the first boot device. Reboot and cross both your fingers and your eyes while you do some gregorian chants. If it starts loading, you're good to go. If it starts loading and suddenly an error message comes up saying there's "no hard drive present" you are forced to go the hard way. Problems revolve around the SATA technology. In the XP haydays, SATA was in its infancy so even a genuine XP CD with service pack 3 apparently does not have those.

Now the Internet is a wonderful source of information, but your miliage will vary. Every site I ofund on this subject said this is easy, just follow the steps. I did, step by step and actually got the operating system to install (involved creating an ISO and streaming the SATA drivers using nLite...link below). However, I could not get the Internet to work no matter how many times I reviewed the specific steps for this specific laptop. I ended up having to dig deeeeep into Dell's support site and found some 6 different versions of drivers for this troublesome network controller XP couldn't recognize. I installed the latest great version and bingo, the Internet came to life. Only thing left was to redo the boot sector so I could have a menu come up giving me a choice of operating systems. That part was the coolest.

Anyway, thought I'd share my experience even if no one cares. Here's a few of the sites I used in case anyone would like to try this on their own. One bit of advice, better have some patience!

nLite Nice program!
Some steps
Just another step-by-step
Great instructions on setting up the boot menu

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I have setup dual boot on my Dell laptop multiple times with XP/W7, XP/Vista, XP/Linux, Linux/W7, just about every combonation i have tried and patience is a must! I find it fun to tinker with that stuff though.

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nlite is the best thing since sliced bread if you are running a raid in xp. i hate floppy drives with a passion, so i don't have one, all fine and dandy till i started running off a raid array. but nlite fixed that and a few other problem like the fact my nic drivers arnt on the xp disk either so i threw them in and the service packs.

right now i am running xp pro, windows 7 RC, windows server 2008rc

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