Beware of XP mode…
Realtime audio and virtutal machines is yet to be a good prospect, read up on this. You’re better off going dual boot and repartitioning (resizing) your drive.
Thank you for the heads-up. I’m not even going to research it, but take your word for it, and set up a dual boot. And then upgrade to WL 7 someday 
Eh, problems.
When I look at the drive under Disk Management, it only shows a mere 14MB unallocated space. In the line entry for the drive itself, it shows 76.32 GB in size with 20.09 GB unused. When I run “Shrink volume” it reveals “0 space available to shrink.”
I’m not getting this. 20 GB isn’t enough space to create a new partition? It’s formatted in NTFS, by the way
You can buy a new drive for less than you were going to pay for your software upgrade.
It’s a winning situation.
I’d go with WD Caviar Black.
I DO need to do that. I ordered one – good call! 
HELP!
Okay I got XP installed in a separate partition. But when I start the computer, it’s not giving me an option of which OS to boot to, it goes straight into XP. I thought it would provide a timer to chose which one?
Windows XP has overwritten your boot loader. Read the following article before you screw up your system:
Remember to turn off system restore on all drives except your XP boot drive. This is a frequently fatal error on the part of dual booters.
Hi Doug,
When you are booting (right from the beginning) repeatedly press the Delete key. This should give you Bios options. Once you are in there, you should have a screen which allows you to set the drive priority. It should have quick instructions at the bottom of the screen (mainly using either the arrow keys, + - or enter.).
You should be able to choose the drive priority from the Bios and the drive set as default will be the one it boots to.
Hope that helps.
[Note-} Celing duck’s boot loader instructions start about 1/3 of the way down the page. Following paragraph may help.
Create Boot Loader
Once installation of XP is successful you can now go through and install the latest Microsoft Updates and drivers. You will undoubtedly notice that the machine is booting directly into XP at this time. This is due to XP writing it’s bootloader over Windows 7’s. To get both XP and Windows 7 as an option at the boot screen you can use the free utility EasyBCD 1.72 or their new 2.0 Beta.
Thank you, gentlemen
Mr Ceiling Duck – thank you – your help has been invaluable! The dual-boot utility worked perfectly. I assumed I had done something bad to boot.ini – I had no idea Vista/Win 7 used a different boot manager than the NT systems
Got everything installed – nice to have Wavelab back!
Thanks again
If you aren’t multi-booting with hidden partitions, you aren’t multi-booting. 
OT, but Doug, your new avatar, is that you and the wife?
Repeating the same lie over and over again does not make it true. It does make you look like a 'tard, though.
I guess you’d have to be a bit of a 'tard to mash your mitten the way that you did.
In fact, why don’t you tell all of us lackeys how you did that, to confirm your superiority to the rest of us.
Anytime, mate. Happy to have been of service. 
No lies, only truth.
You saying different is exactly like the world telling Columbus the world, she wassa flat, just lika you 'ead. 
I;m not a techie, so I don’t know what this means, but all I know is I now have two bootable OS’s, and I can adjust the timer for the default
Yeah, but whichever you boot to, you have to boot through the first. Also, if the first partition goes down, they all do. Seeing as the first partition is C:\ and viruses and malware seek C:, this makes it more vulnerable.
Again, I’m no techie, but my understanding of the BootOCD utility I installed to correct the problem reconciles the differing boot loaders (NTLDR vs BootMGR), and re-orders the hierarchy so this doesn’t happen. It also provided a recovery disc