Question on dual booting XP and vista

[Fiveohhh]

I received a copy of vista from the msdnaa at school, and I'm trying to dual boot it. Right now I have a 160 gig drive that has a 14gb xp partition first, than there is an unallocated 10gig area that used to have Ubuntu. After that there is a 105gb partition that has most my programs installed and misc files. And lastly there is 20gb of unallocated after that.

I tried installing Vista on the 10gb partition and it worked, but it was way too small. So I thought I could put it on the unallocated section at the end of the disk, but I can't seem to get it to work. I seem to remember that a partition can't boot if it's towards the end of a large disk, but I can't find any info on it. When I try the install it gets to the first reboot, and than it won't reboot to finish the install.

Is there any workaround for this, or do I need to find a way to shuffle these partitions around...
Thanks in advance

 

[g8wayrebel]

Speaking from experience , I would highly suggest you install Vista as a virtual OS rather than a hard OS.
It is simple to do , completely segregated from your system for security and doesn't compromise your boot files.
Vista is still a mess for anything other than built and optimized for Vista systems.
If you do this , you can expand the system resources as you need for it , and just wipe it out when and if you run into difficulties.

 

[jonmcc33]

All those partitions and different OS boots? I agree to start using VM as an option instead.

 

[Fiveohhh]

Thanks I'll look into VMWare, see if I can figure it out.