Backstory: My system drive died a couple weeks ago without warning. So I went to Microcenter and picked up a new SATAII drive and 2 more gigs of RAM. One of my friends furnished me with a RC of Windows 7 x64 which has a valid license until next year some time when hopefully I can upgrade to the full version.

Reasoning: Windows 7 is awesome, fast, and beautiful. However it is completely useless for music production. I won't go into too much detail, but it is unusable for me so I had to consider other options. I decided that XP had been working fine for that task and dual-booting would allow me to sandbox my music production OS while still doing everything else on Windows 7 (I already use Linux in a VirtualBox for development).

I already had Windows 7 installed by the time I realized it wouldn't work for music production, but I had planned ahead and left a good deal of space unpartitioned. Windows 7's Disk Manager allows you to resize partitions without having to use third party tools if you weren't thinking ahead. I created a new NTFS partition in my free space for XP and gave it a name to distinguish it during the XP setup.

I created a custom nLite build of Windows XP Pro that was semi-automated, I slipstreamed SP3, and integrated my motherboard, gamer audio, pro audio, ethernet, and graphics drivers. I also used an addon for Notepad2 which is a simple editor I'm rather fond of for trivial tasks (I use Komodo Edit and VIM for serious work). I patched some system files and added some custom themes while removing Luna.

Problems: Later I discovered that the driver integration didn't go so well so I'll probably skip it next time and just put the drivers on my install disk for after the OS installation. I also discovered that Google Chrome's installer is messed up and you can't use it standalone. I was glad I hadn't removed IE so I could download it quickly, but next time I'll include Opera or Firefox on my install media. One of the custom themes I included was non-functional, and another one was just plain ugly, I'd remove these if done again. Overall the problems were trivial and I was very happy with the customizations.

After I burned out my nLite'd XP install disk I rebooted and when prompted selected my newly created XP partition and did a full NTFS format for the sake of completeness. I installed XP, rebooted, everything worked great even after the serious tweaking I gave the OS in nLite.

When XP installs it trashes your existing bootloader and doesn't detect 7, so it boots straight to XP without giving you a choice. What needs to be done now is to reinstall the Windows 7 bootloader and then configure it to work with XP also. Here's how:

1. Reinsert your Windows 7 install media and boot into setup.


2. Select "Repair Your Computer" when the option is given. DO NOT CLICK "Install Now"!


3. Select "Command Prompt" in the Systems Recovery Options windows.


4. Enter these commands at the prompt:
   
   bootrec /fixMBR
   bootrec /fixBoot
   exit


5. Remove your install media and reboot. You will boot back into Windows 7 at this point.


6. Go to the Start Menu or press the Windows Key. The "search programs and files" text box should be selected, click it if not.


7. Type "cmd" and hit ctrl+shift+enter. A UAC window will pop up, click "yes" or hit alt-y.


8. Enter these commands at the prompt*:
   
   bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Microsoft Windows XP"
   bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=D:
   bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
   bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast


9. Profit.

* Replace "D" with the drive letter of your Windows XP install.

You're done, when you reboot the bootloader will give you the option of booting into Windows 7 or XP. If you want to change the default OS or configure the delay time go to Control Panel/System > Advanced System Settings > Startup and Recovery/Settings.