XP Install Cannot See New Partition

I have Vista pre-installed on my laptop. I want to dual-boot with XP Pro. I split my Vista partition using Disk Director. This seemed to work fine, I can view my new partition in Vista Disk Manager, Diskpart, and Disk Director. However, once I boot from my XP CD, and go to the screen where I choose where to install, it only shows me my Vista partition. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

Is the new partition set as "primary" and "active" and formatted NTFS?

Also, if you don't want the XP C drive to be D then you'll need to hide the Vista partition using DD before installing XP.

 

If you are using Windows' installer and bootloader you will (may) come across a page reading "to install windows XP on C:\ ...PRESS 'Esc'" (paraphrase); once pressed THEN it usually shows the existing partitions, then choose the DD10 created partition and proceed with the install.

The "to install Windows XP on C:\" page seems to refer to the first and only hard drive ( as a "partition") I believe. This has thrown me before and I was so agast that the partitions were not listed that I was hesitant to press "Esc" fearing it would delete C:\ !! After re-trying the windows install (not through OS Selector) I went ahead and pressed "Esc" as directed and finally the DD10 partitions WERE listed.

I added another XP install and the "to install Windows XP on C:\" 'page' DID NOT present itself but instead instantly listed all DD10 partitions!! Talk about inconsistencies. I must caution you as my machine does the most unexpected things (who knows it just MIGHT install XP over your Vista on Your machine!).

Of course you could bail out by shutting off your machine and hope that parts of XP were not installed into your Vista install. An identical spare hard drive is the way to go to test this on your system. ( Depending on your machine often a single screw is the only thing you need to remove to pull out your laptop hard drive: Your manufactuers web site should have diagrams on how to take out your hard drive in detail).

 

I haven't tried this to check, but it's possible that XP doesn't recognize NTFS partitions created by Vista. I know that Vista has it's own type. Perhaps you could delete the partition with DD or Vista disk management and then let XP install create the partition from unallocated space. If you do this, make sure to cancel out of the XP install after you make the partition and restart the install (otherwise you may have drive letter messups). When you restart the install, it should see the partition you created.