Dual-Booting

Windows XP Professional supports dual-boot configurations. A dual-boot configuration is one in which two or more operating systems are installed on a computer. By configuring Windows XP Professional to dual-boot with another Windows operating system, administrators allow users to migrate to Windows XP Professional while retaining the ability to start their computers and run applications that are not supported by Windows XP Professional using older Windows operating systems.

An administrator can set up a dual-boot configuration by creating multiple partitions on a computer's hard drive and installing a different operating system onto each partition. The first step in setting up a dual-boot configuration is to

Note 

You can use a utility called FDISK that is supplied with other Windows operating systems to divide a disk drive into as many as four primary partitions or three primary partitions and a number of extended partitions. FDISK is a powerful utility and should be used with caution. Refer to the Help and Support Center for more information about FDISK.

install the older Windows operating system on one of the partitions. This partition will be marked as the primary partition. Then install Windows XP Professional into a different partition, and Windows XP's setup program will automatically set up a dual-boot configuration for the two operating systems.

Note 

You can also purchase third-party partition utilities such as PowerQuest's Partition Magic (http://www.powerquest.com) to create and manage disk partitions. Utilities such as Partition Magic also allow you to set up dual-boot configurations with nonMicrosoft operating systems such as Linux.