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I am using a HP Pavilion laptop. It has 64bit Windows Vista installed. It came pre-installed in the system. I had created a separate partition where I want to add a 32bit Windows Vista. There are some set of programs which are not working in 64bit Windows. I think adding Vista 32bit separately would be more helpful in many ways. Is this possible. I do not want to loose my recovery partition here.
Yes it is possible. You will get the choice to choose Windows in bootloader which will be marked as same Windows 7. They will not be listed as 32bit or 64bit. You can directly install that on the second partition. But it is also necessary for you to locate the right 32bit drivers for your system. If you are unable to find that then ample of your system hardware will not work at all. Until you do not delete the recovery partition your system recovery does not disappear.
It is right that you need appropriate drivers to use 32bit of Vista properly in your system. Or else it will be worthless to install. The best thing you can do is install Vista 32bit on Virtual mode. This will save your time and partition space. If you are just willing to run some applications only then allotting 20GB space from the existing partition is more than enough. Also it does not manipulate the existing bootloader by adding a extra entry of 32bit Windows. It works efficiently on 64bit system.
You can install a multiple windows on different partitions and there is no issue in doing that. What really matters is that you need create separate partition and when you do not need that you have to fix the bootloader.