My old mobo and processor over heated and died so I went out and bought a new Dual Core Intel 1.86 pc with Windows Vista as the os. I took my old hard drive from my recently deceased pc with Widnows XP Home installed on it to transfer over files I still need etc to my new drive... What im wanting to do is format the old drive and install a fresh copy of windows XP on it and be able to switch boot drives from Vista to XP whenever I want, (some of my games etc dont work on vista yet) is this possible and is there anything I need to be carefull with not too send this new pc to an early grave?

PC Specs:
Intel DualCore Cpu @ 1.86GHz
291 GB SATA HD (New Drive with Vista 32-bit)
140 GB SATA Western Digital HD (One I want to install XP on)
1 GB PC4200 RAM
GeForce 7600 GS

if any other info is needed I will provide what ever is nessecary.

There shouldn't be any problems at all. I am actually doing the same thing right now. When you restart your computer it will ask you what you want to run Windows Vista, or an older version of windows.

I haven't seen anyone (yet) trying to put XP on an existing Vista rig, but I can't see why it wouldn't work.
Also, I am not sure if the 2 OSes need to be on seperate physical drives (though it wouldn't hurt), but they do have to be on seperate partitions.

thanks guys ill install it tom and let ya know how I end up

Ok given the same setup as asked above, if I were to have a raid 0 setup and a 250 gig extra drive what drive would be the best for Vista? Vista on the raid or XP on the raid? One more thing what Vista seems to be the best, Home premium or business?

I'd put Vista on the RAID drive. From my experience it tends to benefit from a faster hard drive which the RAID 0 would provide.

And this chart should help you pick which version you want. Neither's better it just comes down to what you want.