XP and Vista, same HD, different partition.

I've got a buddy of mine that's have some difficulty w/ loading Vista and XP on the same HD but different partitions. I don't have all the hardware specs on the laptop, but I do know the OS info.

He originally had XP on the computer. Formatted that and partitioned the HD in two. He installed Vista (Basic) on the partition A, booted up and has had no problems to date. When he installed XP Home (SP 2) on partition B, the computer automatically boots to the XP partition and never asks for the Vista partition.

We've tried boot sequence, checking BIOS, and numerous other methods. Are there any known issues out there with running XP and Vista regaurding this issue?

Basically all we need to find out is how to swap between the two OSs'.

Thanks,
Acid

When installing microsoft OSes, the simplest soplution is too always install the oldest OS first.

Aye,
I was talking with another Tech here at work and he suggested the same thing. So what we're going to do is format both partitions and reinstall XP then Vista.

Thanks for the help,
Acid

Or he can edit the boot.ini file to include the Vista partition. That would be the easiest, but I'm not sure that vista uses the boot.ini file like XP does. You may want to search around on that.

Just be aware that if your Vista install is an upgrade it deactivates your XP install and your XP key, so if you want to dual boot (probably a good idea for the time being judging from the number of incompatibilities we're seeing with Vista), you can't use a Vista upgrade.

You don't upgrade XP but boot the DVD and install on a separate partition with Vista first installed without the key as a 30 day demo.

Then you reinstall Vista from within the 30 day demo version you just installed as an upgrade, there shouldn't be any XP key deactivation issues and the upgrade key will be accepted.