I have windows vista home premium on sony vaio laptop, i want to dual boot the system with windows xp professional.but when i boot the cd the install tab isnt activated n when i try to boot through cd while restarting the system,it gives some error of corrupt disk. what should i do to dual boot with windows xp?

You need the Win7 camera driver, check sony support at:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNCR220E&SelectOS=44

just enter your Win7 operating system (there are 9 versions of Win7), and select the downloads (2)
for your computer camera driver.

Versions of microsoft Win7 - determine which yours is by (these instructions are for WinXP);

START > Control Panel > System > General (tab)

Windows 7 Home Basic 32-bit
Windows 7 Home Basic 64-bit
Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Windows 7 Professional 32-bit
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Windows 7 Starter 32-bit
Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

if your system came with vista originally the issue would be is you would need to know what version of vista you have on your system, the version makes the difference if you have vista home premium then your windows 7 should be a win7 Home premium as well, because if you are upgrading vista using your win7 disc and your windows version are different for example you have vista Home premium and your win7 is win7 ultimate and you do an upgrade the problem will be your product key,

but if you have a retail version of win7 and you are installing it on your laptop Vaio insert the disc in the DVD-drive win7 needs a DVD reader to be able to install win7 if you have a cd-rom it wont work, then turn the laptop off power it back up keep on tapping f12 it should bring you a boot menu, select ODD or which ever is your dvd drive then press enter then enter again if it says on the screen press any key to boot to CD, this should begin win7 installation on the screen saying windows is loading files the so on ans so fort ^_^ this will over write everything in vista but in win7 it will still create a windows.old folder from vista only from the my documents folder my picture and my music and my video and desktop Items but remember application icons will not work on win7 you may need to reinstall the program again for it to work on win7 and yeah make sure that you choose custom/advance in the selection screen do no select upgrade unless you vista and win7 are the same version eg. Vista Home premium / Win7 Home premium ^_^

Install 1st operating system like XP.then install 2nd OS on that like Vista and install these two in different partitions. This will make your computer dual boot.

If you have another operating system you may have to dual boot and if there is no operating system in your notebook, try performing recovery

Hi,

Vaios are prone to faulty Ram ( memory Slots ) The only suggestion i can offer.
Is to remove and re-seat the CPU. this ocassionally solves the problem. if the laptops been dropped or banged. the cpu may have worked loose. but you,ll be looking at either ram or processor. failing this you can assume that theres a motherboard fault.

Thankyou For using Fixya.

Mike @ Compurepair.

go to bios setup n change sata driver to ATA from AHCI n  also disable da flash play module

You don't need to do anything to the BIOS (unless it isn't set to boot from CD, but it probably is).

You will need to purchase a CD with XP (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=672&srkey=windows%20xp) unless your computer came with a free downgrade. If it did, then follow the instrucations that came with it.

Please note that buying and installing XP will reformat your hard drive and you will lose everything, including both personal files and Vista.

If you want to dual boot, check out this website:
http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

to achieve dual boot both XP and Vista, first u need to install xp and then vista on it as a fresh copy

You will need to partition your hard drive into two bootable partitions. Install Vista on one partition and XP on the other. This will make your system a dual boot system. Hope this helps.

yes you can install windows xp on the system but that would cancell the warrantty on the laptop provided by HP so better contact HP before you do that