Help with Dual Booting PLEASE!!

I just got a Dell Inspiron 1720 and was wanting to dual boot Vista with XP. The problem seems to be that Dell has already made 4 partitions... I was wondering what the two "hidden" partitions are for and if they are needed. If they are needed, is there a way to use an extended partition to consolidate some of these partitions (if so which program do I need to use)? Or does one of the current partitions need to be removed to make room for an XP partition? Now that I think about it, do I really need the recovery partition? I mean, it did come with all the software that I would need to reinstall everything didn't it? Or am I mistaken and that partition is used for System Restore? All in all, how would you suggest me dual booting vista and XP, without wiping my current data? Can it all be solved with an extended partition? Or am I completely wrong......


Dell Inspiron 1720
Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (2Ghz)
2 Gb Ram
256 mb NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
1920 x 1200 screen (amazing!)

 

Check this thread
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=187998

There are 4 partitions
Dell diagnostics
Vista
restore partition
Media Direct

 

I already did take a look at that, thanks anyways. The problem is not in the installation, its in the partitioning. I'm not sure which way is best and easiest to give myself a free partition for xp...

 

Do you like/need Media Direct?
If the answer is no, then, you could simply delete Media Direct, and use that partition for XP. You'll end up with the following partition table:

Dell DIAG
Dell Recovery
Vista
XP​

All four are primary partitions.
My suggestion, though, is to kiss goodbye to the Recovery partition and install XP there. You will have

Dell DIAG
XP
Vista
Media Direct​

Actually my suggestion is to kill media direct as well, shrink vista a great deal and then use the available space to create an extended partition with several logical volumes. You could have a partition for another OS, a partition for Vista's OS data, a partition for XP's OS data, a partition for your documents and a partition for music and video.

Backup and restore will be faster in this way, since you could prioritize only the date you care the most (e.g. your documents partition) and in case of OS crash you could restore its image without having to restore the associated data.

My suggestion is therefore to kill Media Direct and Restore (after copying their images to DVD) and build the following structure:

Dell DIAG (100+MB)
XP (10 GB)
Vista (25-35 GB)
Extended partition (the remaining space)

- alternate OS (5-10 GB)
- XP data
- Vista data
- personal files
- big files
- alternate OS data​

 

Thanks for the reply! That was very helpful. I think that I'm going to go with your second suggestion. Is there a way to instead of a primary partition for xp, to make an extended one that I can put both XP, and the recovery partition into? Will it still be able to recover from it if I do? Also, what is a good program to do an extended partition with so that I dont have to reformat my disk (I don't feel like doing all the initial startup again...)?

Edit: I forgot to mention my hd size if that even matters in your suggestion... It came with a 250 Gb hdd.

 

As far as I know, doing that is looking for troubles.
Other OSes can be placed into an extended partition without effort: my two linuxes are in two logical volumes in the ext part and they run just fine.

MS os are more troublesome from this point of view. Perhapes it could be done, but I'd rather sacrifice a primary partition.
As for the recovery partition, I am not sure about its usefulness if you modify the partition table and install another OS. You'll be better off with an image of your OS partition (that's the reason I was suggesting to create an extended partition to keep data and programs).

If you're in a hurry, you can use Vista's Disk Manager. Run it from an administrator account.
You could have problems in shrinking vista's partition, search the forum for solutions - basically you have to temporarily disable recovery, shadowcopy, hibernation and pagefile, then defragmenting the free space - but it should work.

If you want to do a nice partitioning, then download or find a Linux live CD with Gparted on it (Ubuntu, Knoppix, Kanotix and almost any other distro have it) and use Gparted. It's similar to Partition Magic and it's free.

Free as a free beer, and as free speech, that is.

Oh, BTW: you have to surrender a primary partition to create and extended partition. You can't have 4 primary and 1 extended. No, siree. 3 and 1.

 

how do I delete the mediadirect partition?

 

Gparted is a good tool for playing with partitions.... Yes you can install XP on a logical partition and it wont make much of a difference whether it is a primary or a logical..... In any case the boot files for XP will still stay on C:

Remember that XP's boot files are different than Vista's and so the boot files of both these can reside on the same partition without any trouble to another and it is the MBR which actually decides which OS needs to be booted..... Vista's Bootloader has better capabilities than the standard XP's boot loader..... And since Vista's bootloader supports booting ntldr it can be made to boot XP as well...

 

@dmacfour:

Under Vista:
1. Put this into your Run dialogue then run: "diskmgmt.msc"
(With or without the "" marks, works either way)
2. Select your C: drive
3. Right click on the MD partition (It should be 2.5GB in size, and at the end of the drive), and select "Delete Volume..."

Voila! No more MediaDirect