NOTE TO MODERATORS**** Everything in this post INCLUDING the xp disc download is 100% legal, the disc will NOT install unless they use a genuine licence key found on the COA sticker.
So a quick overview.
Having tried to work with vista (having maxed the ram) it simply wasn’t up to the task, doing a lot of photo, video editing and web design just brought the machine to its knees. My only solution was to make the machine dual boot as I occasionally use some of sonys software and didn’t want to loose it. So in short what I have done is take a XP SP2 disc and slipstreamed the 32 bit drivers off the vista installation, then having found it won’t recognise the hard drive on boot, i have converted it into virtual floppy to boot from the DVD rom. I have NOT included SP3 or the latest hoxfixes as I did this some time ago but only just found the time to write the guide and upload the necessary files. My biggest obstacle was do find a compatible driver for the graphics card which just isn’t available, so I have taken the latest driver at the time and re written the .inf file to allow installation.
Everything you need to make your machine dual boot is here HOWEVER you require a LEGITIMATE XP licence for XP HOME edition for the xp to be loaded onto the machine, there is no code or patch/keygen or any other illegal program on the disc to allow installation. I have re written the disk slightly to allow any XP HOME key to be used but that is it.
You will require a little patience and a bit of knowhow as you may have to delete some system files that COULD leave your machine unable to boot, having said that it is just a warning that I felt was needed and is only required if you can’t shrink the hard drive enough.
BEFORE PROCEEDING BEYOND THIS POINT YOU SHOULD BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA.
Downloads you will require if you don’t have them already
Winrar can be downloaded here NOTE* you will need the trial version to unrar (unzip) the xp installation disk
Xp install disk can be downloaded here NOTE* you need to burn the CD as an iso image, nero and the like will know how to handle it so if you have that just double click on the image with a blank CDr in the DVD rom drive. If you don’t have nero a free program called imgBURN which can be downloaded here will do it for you
Netframe2.0 can be downloaded here
Easybcd can be downloaded here
Network driver can be downloaded here
Audio driver can be downloaded here
Video driver can be downloaded here NOTE* when installing the video driver it must be done manually via device manager pointing it at nvac file in the 185.85 folder, this is because it has been re written to accept the system setup.
So firstly we need to create a partition on the hard drive to allow XP to be installed. Now how much you shrink it by is down to you, personally I have 3 partitions, C: at 20GB being the vista, E: at 74.9GB being XP install and 😧 130GB being for my data. The one good thing about vista is that it is easy to shrink the size of the partition, the bad being it is unable to move system files. Now depending on how much you wish to shrink it by and depending on where the installation has placed the files on the hard drive will determine just how easy the process is.
So let’s shrink the hard drive volume to create a partition for the XP install.
Again how much you wish to shrink it by is up to you.
Open the Computer Management panel, which you can find under Administrative tools or by right-clicking the Computer item in the start menu and choosing Manage. Find the Disk Management item in the list and select that.
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Now we’ll shrink our volume down by right-clicking on the main hard drive and choosing Shrink Volume.
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Now you can choose the size that you want to shrink, which really means you are choosing the size that you want your XP partition to be. Whatever you do, don’t just use the default. here I chose roughly 10gb by entering 10000 into the amount, (1GB=1024MB)
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Now that may or may not have been as successful as you wished it to be. Unfortunately Vista’s disk management program is unable to move system files and depending on how much you wish to shrink the partition and the placement of the unmovable files will depend on how this affects you. When attempting to shrink the volume and you come across “there is not enough space available on the disk to complete this operation” although there clearly is, you will have to move the system files before being able to shrink the partition further.
The good news it is possible to move them , the bad is that it COULD leave your machine unable to boot.
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So should you need to move the MFT (Master File Table) files in order to shrink the volume then please carefully use the following steps.
Making Shrink Volume Work
To absolutely ensure that you can shrink the volume, you should disable as many of the system files as you can, at least temporarily. Here’s the list of steps:
1.Run the Disk Cleanup Wizard, making sure to remove the hibernation file and all restore points.
2.Disable System Restore
3.Disable the pagefile ( Open up System in Control Panel, then Advanced System Settings \ Advanced \ Performance \ Advanced \ Change \ No Paging File.
4.In the same Advanced Settings, go to Startup and Recovery \ Settings and then change the Write debugging information drop-down to “None” to disable the kernel memory dump.
5.Disable Hibernation mode in your power options \ advanced power options screen.
Reboot the machine, and then delete your c:\pagefile.sys file.
If you are unable to delete your pagefile.sys you need to take control of it to do so.
So run command prompt (This MUST be done in administrate privileges)
To take ownership of the file, you’ll need to use the takeown command. Here’s an example:
takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\en-US\winload.exe.mui
That will give you ownership of the file, but you still have no rights to delete it. Now you can run the cacls command to give yourself full control rights to the file:
cacls C:\Windows\System32\en-US\winload.exe.mui /G your user name:F
Note that my username is your user name, so you will substitute your username there.
You should now be able to delete the pagefile.sys
Right having done the above we need to defrag the volume and move the MFT files. The easiest way to do this is download and install a 15 day free trial version of perfect disk home edition from <a href="http://www.perfectdisk.com/products/home-perfectdisk10-home-edition/free-trial" target="_blank">HERE</a>
Once you have installed it you need to run it in the OFF LINE mode which will involve the machine rebooting.
At this point you should be able to shrink the partition, at least a decent amount. If you wish to shrink it further but again come across the same “there is not enough space available on the disk to complete this operation” then run perfect disk 10 again in offline mode and keep doing so till it will allow you to shrink the volume to that that you wish. Once you’ve gotten the partition shrunk, you should re-enable those important files:
1.Re-enable the Pagefile (Reverse instructions above)
2.re-enabling hibernate.
3.Enabling System Restore or kernel debugging information is entirely up to you.
4.Reboot.
Ok so we have now managed to shrink to the size that you want
The next step might be confusing, because we need to change the cd-rom drive and the SC and sony stick that’s invariably taking up 😧 , E: and F: at the moment, because we want to use 😧 for the Windows XP partition, but it’s already taken by the drives. If you skip this step than XP will install onto the G: drive, which isn’t the end of the world, but it’s not quite as tidy.
Right-click on the SD, Sony Stick then cd-rom drive in the list and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.
Now we’ll change the SD to F, sony stick to G and the CD drive to use E: by selecting that in the drop-down.
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Now we can create a new partition for XP to live on and make sure that the drive letter is set the way we want. If you do not create a partition now the XP install will do so automatically, but it’s easier and cleaner to do it this way.
Right-click on the Unallocated free space area and then select New Simple Volume from the menu.
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Follow through the wizard and select whatever options you’d like, making sure to use 😧 as the drive letter.
Now you will need to close out of disk management and reboot your computer. This is because we can’t do the next step until we reboot. (you can try, but it won’t work)
So we’ve come back from rebooting… open up Computer from the start menu and then right-click on the 😧 drive and select properties. Give your partition a meaningful name like “XP”. It would be wise to name the C: drive to “Vista” at this point as well.
Now you’ll want to pop the XP for vaio cd into the drive, restart the machine and boot off it. You may have to configure your BIOS to enable booting off the CD drive, or if your computer says something like “Hit Esc for boot menu” you might want to use that.
Once you come to the screen where you can choose the partition to install on, then choose the new partition you created. Whatever you do, don’t try and install onto your Vista partition!
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Now follow the onscreen prompts using your XP licence key and install XP home setting it up how you want it.
Once XP is installed you will need to install the video card (manually by pointing it at nvac file in the 185.85 folder), audio and network card drivers. You will also need to install netframe2.0sp1 to install easyBCD and obviously install easyBCD last.
Now when the system reboots it won’t bring up a boot menu. Although XP recognizes the Vista partition it doesn’t recognize Vista itself. This is because the Windows XP bootloader gets installed to the MBR, thus overwriting the Vista bootloader and so Vista can no longer boot - the XP bootloader can't be made to recognise Vista.
When XP loads, open up Windows Explorer and you’ll see something interesting – a C: and (in this case) an E: drive.
The C: drive contains Windows Vista, and as Windows XP can read NTFS partitions, it can browse and modify Vista’s file structure.
More importantly, applications which have installation paths hard-coded into their install scripts rather than using Windows system parameter variables could easily dump files into C: when they should be installing to E:. This isn’t such a great situation - really the optimal XP/Vista dualboot scenario is to install Vista on a pre-existing XP system but that’s not possible here.
We need to restore the Vista bootloader in order to restore Vista functionality and configure Vista/XP dualbooting.
Launch the application. EasyBCD isn't looking at the XP bootloader - it has found the bootloader on the Vista partition, so this is what you're directly editing.
1.Go to the "Add/Remove Entries" tab. You'll see that there's only one option available in the Vista bootloader at the moment.
2.In the "Add an Entry" section, change the Drive in the dropdown menu from C:\ to D:\. (depending on how you have re named them) Change Type to "Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3", and the Name to "Microsoft Windows XP".
3.Then click "Add Entry"
4.Microsoft Windows XP appears in the manage existing entries box
5."Save".
!!
Then go to the "Manage Bootloader" tab. Make sure that "Reinstall the Vista Bootloader" is selected and then click "Write MBR" and restart the system.
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On reboot, the Vista bootloader is now active and you'll see two boot options.
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Now if you like me only wish to use XP 99.9% of the time you can change the default operating system to XP and change the time in which to select vista. Options for this can be found in easyBCD in the change settings tab, changing the default OS setting and bootloader time out to suit.
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Happy dual booting
Regards
Mentalpen
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