Trouble Dual Booting

Hello, I have been trying to install Windows XP as a second OS as I already have Windows 7 Ultimate installed. Unfortunately, after I select a partition, format it, and reboot the system stalls on the screen after the BIOS that has something to do with a list of devices and such. After 10 or so seconds a few characters and letters go blank randomly on the page. I rebooted and selected my cd drive as the boot device and accidentally didn't press a button in time to boot and a bunch of highlighted numbers were thrown all over the screen and a random smiley face on one of the lines. I can only boot into windows 7 by going into the recovery disk, repairing the startup, and restarting the computer. This fixes it until I try to reinstall windows xp. I have tried several copies of windows xp, one of which I have never had a problem with, and I still get the same problem. I have used the command prompt in the windows 7 recovery disk to do /FixBoot, /FixMbr, and I have tried fixing the MBR through Bootsect. None of it has worked and I don't know what else to do. I assume its a virus, but I don't know if it's on the hard drive or the mobo's BIOS as that screen seems to still be part of the BIOS but idk.

Also, I just reformatted Windows 7 last week with no problem.

Any help is appreciated!

You need to install the older OS first as the newer OS will overwrite the MBR.

I don't know what the smiley face is about but I do know from experience that the easiest way to do a dual or triple boot with XP, Vista and W7 is to start with a clean HDD then partition it into however many OS's that you want to run and install XP on the first one and the subsequent OS's on the second and third but you must install them in the order that they were released.

You could try and use the MBR fix option after installing XP but I've never managed to get that to work for me as W7 always asked for the install disc on boot up.

32 Bit W7 and 64 Bit XP.

I have tried both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows xp though and same problems. I think vista and windows 7 use similar boot managers or something like that though.

Check out this guide. It's got a guide on how to set it up with XP installed first, and for for when Windows 7 is installed first.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutoria [...] -7-xp.html