Portege R500: XP - Vista Dual Boot

Question

After much struggling I have R500 XP Vista Dual Boot working fine.
I bought the R500 with Vista but found it not so good for real use.
Microsoft have announced that you can go back to XP if you have a Vista Business licence - but Toshiba won't as yet supply an install CD.
I decided to set up a dual boot with another XPPro licence rather than do a reinstall. Many of my problems would apply equally to a straight XP reinstall.
You need to shrink the Vista and/or data partitions to create space for a new primary partition, and then boot from an XP disk to install it in the new partition.
When you do the XP install you'll get a blue scren crash before you get to the screen asking where you want to install because the XP CD doesn't have a sata driver for the hard disk unless you slipstream the OS to include the right driver, or use F6 to load the drivers you need.
You need the Intel Matrix drivers - available from their website - here
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2800&OS FullName=Windows*+XP+Professional&lang=eng&strOSs= 44&submit=Go%21
and you need Item 7 which you put on a usb floppy to use when you press F6.
But watch out - when the XP Install shows you a choice of your special controllers and you have to choose one - there seem to be about 4 in the list. I had no idea which to choose. In fact the list scrolls and the one you want is 82801GBM SATA AHCI (mobile) which is near the bottom of the list. if you choose the wrong one the process will end with a blue screen 0007B Stop crash.
With the correct driver XP installs fine. Then when you reboot Vista appears to have gone (although it hasn't and you can see the Vista drive and files from within XP). The problem is that XP overwrote the Vista boot file so you need to repair Vista.
The way to fix this is to use a Vista boot CD, get past the first screen, select Repair, select Command prompt, and then at the command prompt, type:
bootrec.exe /fixMBR
and then
bootrec.exe /fixBoot
then exit and reboot.
Vista will then work, but XP will have gone!
then you need a utility to help you modify the Vista boot record - I used EasyBCD (readily available on the web) having failed with Acronis OS Loader.
One other problem - I had a "missing hal.dll" message which stopped XP installing as well. This was because the partition number in the boot.ini file it built was wrong - for me the correct number was 3. As XP had failed to installat hat stage I could get into Vista and use notebook to edit boot.ini
Once I had both systems booting I could bring XP up to date and load the Toshiba drivers. Once all the Toshiba drivers had been installed the system tree had no yellow warnings and everything seems to work OK.
The whole process is well documented on the web but the points I've highlighted here were not or caused me particular grief and took much trial and error and reseach to work out and when I called them last week some of these points were not apparently known to and were certainly not solved by Toshiba UK support.
I now have a satisfactory dual boot - XP is much better for me than Vista - and I will revert to Vista if and when the service packs etc mean that it seems to have adequate performance.
I hope Toshiba will document this process properly and publish the results and supply an easy way of getting the files you need in one operation rather than having to download each bit separately.
Good luck!

Answer 1

Hi Richard
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Best regards