I have an HP with Vista pre-installed and no Vista DVD whatsoever. I partitioned the D: for XP but when I go to install XP it only shows C: available. And I do not want to overwrite anything by installing XP on the C: so how do I go about keeping both OS?

Without a Vista DVD I would not advise you to try installing XP.

You may be able to contact HP and request one, but I am not sure how that works, or how much they will charge you for one.

When you made the D partition did you format it and make it active, it not that may be why it is not showing up, another reason may be because it is a SAT-A drive and requires the raid drivers for it so XP can see and use it.

I activated the drive but no luck. It told me it would not be advised to activate it without a OS installed but I tried anyways. How do I allow the SAT-A drive to be accessed by the D: drive?

J_garcia wrote:

I activated the drive but no luck. It told me it would not be advised to activate it without a OS installed but I tried anyways. How do I allow the SAT-A drive to be accessed by the D: drive?

What Daniel was saying is you will need the SATA drivers for the drive to install XP on it or the XP installer wont see it.

Do you have a floppy drive ?
You should get the SATA drivers from HP for XP.

Without having a Vista Disk, I would not be messing with trying to install XP. If you do manage to install XP, you will not be able to get to Vista again, and you are at risk of making your computer unbootable

I just got done with this process. After I reallocated the partitions I tried to install XP but it said I didn't have a HDD because the SATA driver doesn't exist on the orig XP disk. The first thing was to get the driver and then create an XP install disk with the SATA driver AKA slipstreamed. I did this using nlite (a free download). It was actually a pretty straight forward process.
Once I installed XP with the new install disk it would only boot to XP until I installed VBP then I got back to booting to Vista the problem is that it only boots to Vista and doesn't give me the option of the xp boot. That's where I'm stuck.

JRinBoise wrote:

I just got done with this process. After I reallocated the partitions I tried to install XP but it said I didn't have a HDD because the SATA driver doesn't exist on the orig XP disk. The first thing was to get the driver and then create an XP install disk with the SATA driver AKA slipstreamed. I did this using nlite (a free download). It was actually a pretty straight forward process. Once I installed XP with the new install disk it would only boot to XP until I installed VBP then I got back to booting to Vista the problem is that it only boots to Vista and doesn't give me the option of the xp boot. That's where I'm stuck.

Try this guide.

http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/about92429.html

How many physical hard drives are installed in your rig ?