This was not an easy task and in fact I began at 11am on Tuesday and finished at 0330 am on Wednesday. His laptop was split into two partitions and the first had XP, the second had Vista.
Vista refused to shrink and so I had to use some third party software "Acronis Disk Director 10" Which did the job - but only after I had wasted 3 hours attempting various work rounds to Vista's refusal to shrink the partition. More time was wasted when I tried to swap the two partitions round placing Vista in front of XP. Whilst I did manage to do that, unfortuntaley this caused the XP drive letter (from within XP) to change preventing it from booting. So I then had to return things back round again.
Still having problems getting XP to restore from Norton Ghost (No problems with the now shrunken Vista) I then tried an experminent and it worked. I wiped the Hard drive clean and created an 80GB partition (for XP) leaving about 30 GB (for Vista). Next I installed a clean copy of XP from my XP SP2 set up disc. Once that had finished I now turned to Norton Ghost and started the computer from the recovery disc. Instead of restoring the entire computer I did a restore of ALL the files (Windows included) - This worked and so I had managed to use a back door method of getting XP back.
The rest was then plain sailing, I did a similar thing with Vista. This time I installed a clean copy of Vista from my Vista set up disc - from within XP. I used the serial number found on the label underneath his laptop which Vista accepted. Once installed this had created the correct boot files on the first partition (XP) - now I formatted that Vista partition. I had to do it this way because when I ran Norton Ghost to recover the saved Vista partition it stopped working with a report that the drive was locked. After I had formatted the drive it was back into XP, start up Norton Ghost and then restored the saved Vista partition.
Job done and it was now all working. All that remained was the normal general housekeepiong - defrag the discs, Install Windows Updates etc.