dual boot xp and vista

I have Vista Home Premium installed on one of my 2 sata hard drives and would like to install Xp on the second one. I'd like to do this so that I can use it for games and such that won't run on my Vista system. I've seen plenty on dual booting Vista with Xp already installed, but nothing Xp with Vista installed. Can it be done? I thought I could just uninstall Vista drive from computer, reformat second drive, install Xp on it, and then fix the boot loader in Vista to dual boot. For some reason I can no longer get the Xp to install. After it install from cd and reboots it gives me an error and won't continue rest of set up.
Any ideas?

Sorry dual boot doesn't work like that. Windows will see XP as an older OS and not allow an install. Oh, cause you have to do it from the desktop.

Install XP first. Then install Vista on a seperate partition.

I did get Xp to install finally. Had to set size to large in bios rather then auto. After install I discovered it had only reformatted 129 gigs of the 160 gig hard drive for the Xp install and showed a second partition of 21 gigs as unallocated. I used Partition Magic to reclaim the unallocated portion of the drive after I formatted it. I'm wondering if Vista left something on this drive that was creating my troubles with Xp install and reformatting of drive. Seems odd since this was used strictly as a storage drive. Guess I'll try to get the Vista drive to recognize it for dual booting next. Found an reference ( kb919529) in Micro$oft knowledge base I'm going to try. Worth a shot I guess.

No go! Obviously an outdated article. Most likely for a beta edition of Vista. Commands aren't correct. I'll just use the boot menu til I can redo the Vista install or find something that works.

Dual booting with 2 separate drives? I can't be too sure, but if Vista is compatible with XP's bootloader. If it is then I'd do this; say I had XP installed on drive1, I'd unplug it and install Vista on drive2, then go back and edit the XP bootloader and add another line to where Vista is installed on the second drive. This prevents the Vista bootloader from taking over the XP drive and it will set the Vista drive as a C: drive not some other letter, for compatibility issues.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP MCE" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

This is an example with MCE, but I think it might be applicable to Vista, too. This is with the assumption that you've set the XP drive as the primary boot up drive. I think if you have Vista as the main boot up drive then you could use one of the Vista bootloader tools (BCDedit) to do pretty much the same thing.

I actually found the proper edits for the Bcdedit and got the Vista loader to give me the option to boot to either operating system. Thing is I need to use boot menu to bring it up as Vista is on second hard drive. I'll have to swap the hard drives and put Vista first. I'll let you know if it works and post link to the bcdedit commands I used.

Success!!!

Switched the hard drives so Vista is first in line and boots right into boot screen. Can now select whichever operating system I desire and go right to it. Here is link to the Bcdedit command:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...c349-427c-b035-c2719d4af7781033.mspx?mfr=true
I skipped step 2 of the directions and change second command to:
Bcdedit /set {legacy} boot device "partition=D:"
D: being the hard drive where XP resides as seen from Vista system.
Nice thing about doing it this way is that I can reformat either hard drive and just reinstall without having to do both.