According to MS help files on dual boot , they say you have to have the older OS installed first. If you install an older OS after the newer OS the old OS overwrites the boot sector and stops the new one from booting.
 
Now I have my new DAW up and running I'm re-purposing the old one. It has W 7 Ultimate 64. I want to install XP 32 bit to run some older software that won't run on W7. Office Front Page and STeem, the Atari ST emulator. 
Before I do something stupid is there anyone here that has gone dual boot in this manner. I hate to have to re install W7 this project is not that critical, It's just I love Steem, and I'm stuck with Front page for my web site cause I'm stuck....
 
I was thinking of pulling the W7 OS drive , putting in a blank drive, installing XP, then put the W7 drive back in? would that solve the boot sector issue? , and would I have dual boot option on start? 
 
I think I can still get XP 32 bit drivers for the Mobo as it's at least 5 years old. 

If it looks like its too problematic would it be an option to buy a secondhand box running XP, you should be able to pick one up for peanuts. You could use a KVM switch so both boxes can share the same monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I have a couple of old boxes, but this is a science experiment, I posted on Toms Hardware and was given a link to this which explains how to do this and use a 3rd party utility to fix the boot loader issue. But it's not clear if using a second drive will work  
 
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/8790/dual-boot-your-pre-installed-windows-7-computer-with-xp/
 
 

Thanks for that link, JV. I'm in the same situation. I'm keeping the XP machine live and using a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse between it and the new W8.1 box. But the XP machine is very old and I fear the day it'll stop working, and it's absolutely crucial that I keep it (or a clone of it) going for the foreseeable future.
 
My tentative plan of action has been to add another disk drive to the new machine, make it bootable into XP, and just change my boot sequence in the BIOS if I ever need to boot into XP. But that's not as convenient as a boot menu option, and it's a waste of power to keep an unused drive spinning day and night.
 
Let me know how your experiment goes! For now, I'm putting all my eggs into the Acronis basket to save me if one of my ancient drives craps out.

This may help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/...arison_of_boot_loaders

I prefer to hide my OS partitions from each other.

I've pretty much given up on multi-boot, even as fast as the current machine boots I just don't like the re-start requirement. So I use VirtualBox. There are compromises required, but I have a Ubuntu LAMP server running in the background, and an instance of UbuntuStudio I can pull up, and last night I installed the tech preview of Windows10.
 
Anyone wanting to experiment with different operating environments might want to take a look.
 
In the meantime, when I absolutely positively have to have the OS running on the hardware I use multiple drives so that none of the operating environments can victimize the others<G>

Also hated dual booting, but weaned myself off the older stuff... But then I'm just a hobbyist

I run VM's as well (virtual machines) but find performance unacceptable for DAW.

I have critical development software that won't run on W7 or W8, so I need an XP machine in order to stay in business. Past experience with virtual machines is that they weren't 100% emulations, but it's been ten years since I swore off them. Maybe time to give 'em another go. VirtualBox would sure be a convenient solution.

you should defintely give vm's a go, they're much better than a decade ago :-) using vmware at work every day