Problems with Partitions on Vostro

Once I got my new laptop with a 120gb hard drive, I wanted to dual boot, so I made three partitions in my hard drive, 30 gb for vista, 30 gb for XP and 50 gb for my files.

The system came with XP Home installed on it. I used partitionmagic in XP to partition the hard drives, then I installed Vista Ultimate. However, I then found a Windows XP Media Center Edition CD and then decided to reinstall that.

Now after I installled Partitionmagic on XP, the partitions do no show up right. For the partition names, there are question marks and the program does not allow me to resize the partitions.

I then tried the partition manager in Vista but the same problem exists. I cannot resize the partitions, like making one smaller and another biffer

Can someone please help?

 

For gods sake. Wipe everything and install what you want... thats what I did when my 1500 came.

 

I did wipe everything.

First I partitioned the hard drive using XP Home which came with the laptop, then I installed Vista, and then I installed XP Professional over XP Home.

After doing that, my partitions show up as wierd names on XP Professional. Both in Vista and in XP, the programs do not allow me to extend my partitions with unallocated space. It does, however, let me shrink some of the partitions.

 

PartitionMagic is not Vista compatible, but I am not sure if that was the problem in your case. To avoid all these troubles, I am using VirtualPC for XP right now. It does not do all the thing as a native XP installation and runs slower, but it is easy to install/uninstall. I only need to run my video conversion codec there.