plz new install partiton xp single hd using partit

150G HD, xp pro sp2, using partition magic. Does Vista have to be first on the drive? does it matter? Is there a walk thru anywhere? I have looked, i'm not totally lazy. I'm going to make a 2nd partition-primary, say around 50Gigs. then just load vista to it, by making it the active drive. NTFS for both. Sound about right? PM will help with making new OS partition, but I am sceptical, sense vista is new and not in the options of PM. Or should I just resize the xp drive, and just have an allocated partition to load Vista? I am very unsure of this sense its new. ANY help is appreciated. thanks in advance B

If your hdd is a SATA drive, you may have to provide a SATA driver during the install. Use the one for your motherboard if you have it.
The drive I used is a 250 GB and I did a clean install of XP and partitioned the drive at the beginning of the install. I made a 2nd partition and it was just a basic drive called D. I then formatted it as NTFS and it was a logical drive. That is all that I did with the drive. I then had one drive with two partitions-- C and D.
WinXP was installed on C and I installed Vista from XP onto D using the custom option that was presented during the install.
While booted into XP, I put the DVD into the drive and it auto started. When I got to the part where the installer lets you do an upgrade, I choose "custom" instead and then selected the D drive as the target location. The installer will leave you with a boot menu (whether successfully installed or not) that lets you choose Vista or XP.
If you have problems and want to get rid of the boot menu, use your XP install cd and boot to it and let it run until you have the option of installing XP or repair (by pressing "r"). When you press "r", you will be able to select the XP OS-- you have to enter the NUMBER of the selection, probably 1. Then type "fixboot" with out quotes and type "exit" when you see the message that the boot sector is repaired (or whatever it says). The computer should boot into XP.