Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP

So you got your shiny new pre-installed Windows 7 computer over the holidays, 
but you want to have trusty XP standing by in a dual boot setup. Today we’ll walk through creating a new partition in Windows 7 then installing XP on it.

In this process we are going to shrink some free space on the Windows 7 hard 
drive to allocate toward a new partition. Make sure to take a moment and decide 
how much space to use for the XP partition. Make sure you have enough space 
on your hard drive for files you’ll be adding to each.

Create a New Partition

The first thing we need to do is create a new partition on the Windows 7 machine. Luckily we can do it without any 3rd party software. To begin, click on Start and 
type either partition ordisk management into the search box and at the top of 
the menu click on Create and format hard disk partitions.

The Disk Management window opens, and from here we need to free up space 
on the (C:) drive Windows 7 is installed on. Right-click on the drive and select  
Shrink Volume.  

A window pops up showing the drive is being queried for available space.

 

Now enter the amount of space you want to shrink the volume. You’re shown 
the total size of the disk and the amount of size that is available to shrink. 
In this example we’re freeing up 40GB of space.

After the process completes you’ll see the new Unallocated space. 
 Right-click that and selectNew Simple Volume.

The New Simple Volume Wizard launches which is a straight forward process. 
When you get to the Format Partition section, NTFS is selected by default as the
file system and you can leave that as is. You might want to rename the Volume
label something else like “XP Partition” so it’s easier to identify when installing XP. 
Also you’ll probably want to make sure to check Perform a Quick Format.

After the format is complete you will see the new volume as a healthy partition 
listed.

Now when you go into My Computer you’ll see the the new disk and notice that 
space has been taken away from the (C:) drive Windows 7 is installed on.

Install XP on the New Partition

Now that you know how to create a new partition on your Windows 7 machine,
it’s time to install XP on it. Here we’re installing XP Professional on the 
new partition. Boot from the XP installation disk and start the install process.

When it comes to choosing a partition, make sure you select the one you 
created using the steps above. In this example we made a 10GB partition 
for the XP install.

If the partition you created was already formatted as NTFS you can leave it, 
or you can choose the FAT file system if you want. 

Basically you continue through as if you were doing a clean install on any hard 

drive.

Create Boot Loader

Once installation of XP is successful you can now go through and install the latest Microsoft Updates and drivers. You will undoubtedly notice that the machine is 
booting directly into XP at this time. This is due to XP writing it’s bootloader 
over Windows 7’s. To get both XP and Windows 7 as an option at the boot 
screen you can use the free utility EasyBCD 1.72 or their new 2.0 Beta.

 

VistaBootPRO 3.3 (free version) will still work too which you can 
download here. VistaBootPRO is now called DualBootPRO and is no longer
free, it’s $9.95 for a single user license.

After getting the bootloader back you should see both XP and Windows 7 
as options in the Windows Boot Manager.