Vista and XP Reformat Help

I've reformatted many times before, but this time i want to do it different. I have XP and Vista on different hard drives in my computer (quick breakdown). I have a 500GB and a 120GB, on the 500 GB there is 2 partitions. one 15gb and the other is the rest of the hard drive. The 120gb hard drive is just a single partition. XP is on the 15gb partition and vista is on the 120 GB hard drive. Ok, now to explain what i want to do. I need to reformat XP cause its "that time" again. I want to reformat XP without messing up the boot screen that was installed with vista cause i like it. can I even reformat windows XP without messing up my boot screen? If it can be done how do i do it, and if it cant how can i preserve my ability to boot to vista?
-J J

 

Vista can give difficulties when reinstalling XP,because of Vista's bootloader.

I suggest that you first try disconnecting the Vista hard drive, and see if Windows will boot to XP- if it will, then format and reinstall XP.
I it will not boot without the Vista hard drive connected, Vista might make it very difficult to reinstall XP, as XP is an older version of Windows, and I found that with a sata drive that neede the sata floppy driver, it would not find the correct driver (even though it was the correct one, and I tried several new downloads with the same result.
Vista will be o.k, but reinstalling XP with Vista onis a pain.

 

Golden rule seems to be put XP on first, then Vista .
I gave it many tries, and in the end I used Hyperos 2007VE (unfortunately, not free) , but I believe Acronis do a similar tool, but have not tried it.
With Hyperos, I can clone XP, and save a copy of the partition on the hard drive for re-installation, if XP gets corrupted, or, needs reinstalling- I have copies of Vista and XP on my two 160gb hard drives, and backups, too.
I wiped everything, installed XP, installed Hyperos, partitioned the drive with Vista, and installed Vista- Vista takes your C: drive, no matter where you put it.I then copied Xp to another partition, and Vista to another partition, and made the backups of both , in case of corruption. Then if I have problems, I can drag a partition backup to the corrupted partition, and nbe up and running in minutes, instead of hours.
You can otherwise try the Vistabootpro, or,other boot configuration tools, instead.
A further possibility is seagates Disc Wizard, as that can clone/backup your partitions, but I am not sure how well that works with Vista.

 

Have a look at this thread where it was wanted to put 2000 on, after Vista.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?p=1014396#post1014396

 

Well, thanks to baklogic's post i found a method to make it childs play. First thing I did was before reformating windows XP I made a backup of my BCD with EasyBCD 1.6 and saved it. After that I installed XP like normal, and got into XP. I installed my internet driver got on and downloaded vistabootpro and the .net framework 2.0 required for install and installed it. Once it was running I clicked the "System Bootloader" tab and then I ticked the "Windows Vista Bootloader" and "All Drives" bubbles and installed the boot loader then I clicked the "Backup / Restore Center" tab and navigated to were i saved the BCD settings i backed up in vista. and once i found it i click the restore button. and what do ya know its like i never reinstalled XP... well except for the lack of XP bull poo from before