Advice in Partitioning HD for Vista Beta

I have a 80GB HD (all partitioned as my C: drive), which is about half full. I would like to try the beta of Windows Vista.

1) Is there a recommendation of software (Partition Magic) to make a second partition without formatting the C: drive? I'd like just have the DOS-like boot selection screen without any fancy shell.

2) Will Windows Vista work as a dual boot with XP Home SP2?

3) Since I have a Turion64, shouany recommendations on trying the 32 or 64-bit versions?

I used to betatest for MS years ago, and I used Win 3.0, 3.1,and 95 betas as my primary OS. I'm a little leray of doing that yet with Vista.

Thanks for the help!

 

Be very careful if you are going to go ahead with this. I attempted dual booting Vista last week and was not so successful. I was able to partition my drive, install Vista smoothly, but my other partition was not recognized. I used Partition Magic to create the second partition. It turned out that the original partition was set to 'hidden' and stopped recognizing the OS. I'm sure there are step by step guides somewhere.

 

You might need to mark as "active" the partition you are going to install Vista on. Otherwise, it will install its bootloader in the wrong partition, and not let you change the drive letter of that partition from D:.
Oh, and I use Grub to "makeactive" each partition and then chainload from it, depending on whether I select XP or Vista in Grub.