Win7 + Vista Dual boot on X200

I want to install Windows7 on my X200. However I want to keep my Vista intact as well as the Recovery option work just as well as it works now. I don't want windows 7 installation to messup the Recovery option by making it corrupt or make non-functional. Please suggest how I can do Windows7 install.

The thing I want someone to suggest what steps should I follow so I can keep the receovery option still valid . Down the road if I want to comeback to factory state wihout using the DVDs or CDs (Recovery) I should be able to do that. Thats what I want to know.

Thanks

 

This might prove pretty difficult, since all your hard drive is already partitioned and you express your desire to not have to use restore discs.

The first thing you would need to do is make yet one more partition for your windows 7 installation. To do that, you need free space. Perhaps you have some on your primary hard drive, however you might find that you can't free up more than a very small amount of it. You can check by going to the start menu, right clicking on My Computer, and left clicking on Manage.

This utility will take a few quick seconds to start up and will show you a two or three paned window. In the left most pane, there should be 3 drop down menus, the 2nd one labeled Storage. Left click on that and select Disk Management from its drop down. This will show you your partitions and you can attempt to create a new partition here. (here's a full guide: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6170510.html)

To create the new partition, right click on your primary (C) drive and then left click on Shrink partition. Don't worry, it won't do anything to your drive just yet.

Another window will open giving you a few options to shrink that drive and showing you how much space you can actually free up. For some users they're able to shrink a significant amount, eg cut a 250 hard drive into two 125's, but for others, even with a 320gb hd with more than 300gb free, you may find that you can only shrink up to a few megabytes. The full explanation of that is here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...ows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/

If you manage to create a partition with enough space to install Win 7, then that should be it-- after that installation should go just like that of any windows onto your selected partition without harming any of the other partitions, including your recovery/C drive.