dual booting xp and vista

[tnf]

anyone done it?

I've got a machine running xp now (the one I built this summer), and still have an OEM version of Vista (32 bit :/) that I haven't opened. Boredom got me to thinking about dual booting so I could see what Vista is like as I've yet to use it at all.

Did I need to consider a dual boot situation when I partitioned my disk at the beginning (just 1 physical drive) or can I set up dual boot as long as I have enough unused space? And does that unused space have to be unformatted/unpartitioned?
edit - nvm i figured out the last questions -

so back on point, does anyone here dual boot them?

[Scourge]

Yes, I've been dual booting for a while. I mainly use XP to play some older games and things like that. I use Vista for the main OS now.

[obsidian]

Vista comes with a partition manager, so if you already have it installed you can resize the partition. I'm not sure if there is a way to do it the other way around, if you already have data (XP) on the hard drive and you want to install Vista on just the unused space.

If Vista won't let you resize the partitions during installation, you can try using an Ubuntu Live CD to boot into Ubuntu first and use Ubuntu's partition manager to create a new blank NTFS partition to install Vista on.

Just a FYI in case you are having trouble.

I dual booted Vista with OS X on my Mac using Boot Camp but have since removed the Vista partition. Ideally I wanted to run Boot Camp and Parallels off the same install, but at the time Parallels required a second installation of Vista which was retarded. Most of my other computers are dual booting XP/Ubuntu.

[Foo]

The easiest way to dual boot is to put XP on first, Vista installs gracefully and sets up a boot manager for you and everything. You can install Xp when running vista, but you have to fudge the boot manager yourself a bit to get it all going.

Stick a second drive in for the easiest fix to your partitioning issue...