Hi all, I'm new to the site. Thought i'd share my experience trying to perform a dual install with Vista and XP. (What a nightmare!)

I have recently had problems installing XP with Vista install but am happy to inform all of you that i may have a solution to the "Disk Read Error occurred, press ctrl-alt-del to continue" error. Note that you need a Vista installation cd to do this. When you receive said error, throw your Vista cd into your computer and boot off it.

When the install screen pops up, in the bottom left hand corner there is an option that says "Repair my Computer". Click it and it will take you to a box which prompts you to select your HDD. When you have done that a few options will appear in the box. Select the first option "Startup Repair" and it will do a scan then ask you to restart. If you select “Click here for diagnostic and repair details� it will tell you that a corrupt boot loader was found and fixed.

Restart and hopefully you problem will be solved but in my case it wasn't. Instead the previous "disk read" error was replaced with "Error loading Operating system" I trawled the Microsoft knowledge base and goggled like a madman until I found someone with the same problem. This person said that deleting the XP installation and replacing it with Vista would solve the problem. So i booted up the Vista cd, formatted the XP installation and installed Vista on the same partition. This enabled my computer to boot up successfully with all of my files untouched =D.

Well I hope this solves some problems relating to dual booting with Vista and XP.