Partition Hard Prior to Restoration of OS

I recently purchased a X6 Docking Station for my X60 Tablet. It came with hard adapter, so I when ahead and purchased a 750GB drive for extra storage, well, it turns out the adapter gives me any error 2102: HDD1 initialization error, which I found out is a bad ultrabay. So I wanted to used the 750GB Hard in place of the 160GB that I installed. I would like to partition 150 for OS and programs, and then you the rest for music, videos, files, Virtualization. I would be using the standard X60 recovery disc, since XP Tablet is not sold as a Stand alone OS. I know that the disc will install the OS and drivers, but is there a way to install on a section/partition of the hard drive. Any suggestions would be apprciated.

 

You probably cannot do this using the system restore tool. Only by clean installing the OS. (You can legally download the windows 7 ISO from MS and use the CDKEY on your laptop when installing)

 

Basically, I want to install XP Tablet (from the 6 Recovery disc) on a a 160GB partition, so that I can make different partition outside the OS partition. I know that the restore disc will install the OS on the whole drive, or is there an option in the recovery process to single out a 160GB primary partition. On my X32, I had the same issue, XP Professional would in install on the whole disc and then I would used partition magic to reduce the primary partition drive and make separate partition, which I don't want go through. Any help would be appreciated. I did think about installing Win7, but still have some program that run great in XP and no so great in Win7. If clean install is the only option, it can not be done, I do not have a Retail XP Tablet disc.

 

Well, during any actual install, be it window xp or 7, you can install to only a partition, instead of the whole drive if you wish. There is no need to resize the partition after. However in a recovery utility they probably have locked out all of the options for partitions, so you are probably out of luck.

 

Why do you feel the need to have separate partitions? You can do everything you want in a single partition unless you plan to boot other operating systems. Virtualizaton doesn't require a different partition unless you are going to boot ESX or something.

 

This is true.

 

Sorry, for the late reply, turned out the Docking Station was bad. The HHD bay works great in my X61 Dock. So, I decided to use the extra bay with the X61. I was planning to set up a PC/Thinkpad, for studying. I have my desktop set with virtual enviroments, but since I can not take my desktop with me, I decided to make a thinkpad probably.

I only wanted to keep the files separated, in the event of OS corruption. This way, say, your OS gets damaged, you can just install the OS under the first partition, therefore keeping all other files on the PC intact. Say you make a OS partition 125GB, make space for OS, updates, programs, then you partition the rest of the drive for all your other files, music, photos, documents, virtualization files and etc. If your OS gets currupted, you only have to re-install on OS partition, you dont' have to worry about moving all your files of the drive, (which could be corrupted).

In the end, I ended up scrapping the ideal and started using he drive bay in the X61, I am in the process of setting up my X200 with a 1TB drive to run virtual enviroments.

Thanks for the comments.