Dual Boot Vista and XP - both from C: drive

After trying to setup dual boot with Vista and XP I always ended up with Vista and XP on different drive letters. I find this annoying as I prefer to always have Windows installed on C:. With XP installed on (say) D: there is always the concern that when running under XP you'll accidentally mess up your C: Vista install, and you won't find out about it until you boot back into Vista.
After some research I finally found the solution, but it was in a such an obscure place (some blog comments) I thought I'd summarise it here.

The steps below allow you to setup a (single hard drive) PC like this:

Boot into Vista:
C: Vista boot drive
D: Data drive
X: XP drive (or just dont assign a drive letter)

Boot into XP:
C: XP boot drive (was X: above)
D: data drive (was D: above)
V: Vista drive (was C: above)

(NOTE: "drive" here really refers to a "partition")

This is the exact configuration I'm using now, and the steps below outline how to do this.
If you need more detailed steps, you should refer to the articles at the bottom of this page or the article in the latest edition of PC Zone magazine.

Basic steps
1. Install Vista onto C:
2. Create a data partition and assign it as D:
3. Create an XP partition (e.g. by reducing the size of one of the other partitions) and format it as NTFS
4. Mark the XP partition as ACTIVE (the clever bit). NOTE: This stops Vista from booting til you've finished
5. Boot from XP CD and install XP. Choose C: as the install drive (the active partition)
6. Once XP is running, copy NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.ini from the XP partition to the Vista partition. This is required because the Vista partition will soon be the boot partition again.
7. Still from XP, use Disk Manager to change the Active partition back to the original Vista partition.
8. Reboot and Vista should boot up - if not, see "Vista boot fix" below
9. Download and use EasyBCD as described to change the boot entries so you can dual boot.
10. Voila! Now you can play with your drive letters under each OS to match the above or whatever letters you'd like

Vista boot fix
If you get "Error loading operating system" at this point, do this:
8.1 Boot from Vista DVD
8.2 Repair
8.3 Cmd prompt
8.4 Bootrec /FixMbr
8.5 Bootrec /FixBoot


Credits and more info
Please see Here
Search the comments for "changing active partition" for the above "both on C:" info
Thanks to Doug Hynes for that comment - saved my sanity!

Popup comments

Managed to do this using instructions here.

Had to first go to Template and use the "switch back to classic template" (or similar wording) option.

First Post

This is really just a test post to see what my blog looks like and how it works.
Then I can post some actual content.