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Well i got a vista cd, finally none on this factory image stuff. but now i need help. i want to install vista by creating a partition of the hard drive with xp on it. but i cant because for some reason it wont let me. now is there a way without reformatting my hard drive to install vista on a partition and still keep xp, or i can reinstall xp but i want to keep my files, i have no backup.

What are you using to partition the HDD drive ? you can do it in the windows recovery console but i would reccomend using something like Partition magic, if it's not allowing a partition then you may not have enough HDD space to do it, check that you have enough space.

400gb left... i got enough space, but from what i hear i cant partition the hd that windows is installed on.

If Windows is using the whole drive now and you want Vista on that same drive, you will need to defragment, then use something like gparted to shrink your Windows partition. At that point I would leave the remaining space (from when you shrunk it) untouched. Then boot from the Vista CD and install there. It will see the unpartitioned space and create a partition for you and install there. Generally you want to let the OS you are installing do as much as possible of the partition creating and formatting, but in this case I don't think you can do it all with the Vista disk.