A few questions b4 I get Vista

My uni is offering free (unfortunatly) "upgrades" to Vista Ultimate.
My question is this:
Can I put this Vista on a separted partion and keep XPPro on the other.
Please post, I'm trying to find out soon so I can determine If I want to go through the trouble of downloading it or not.

 

I don't see why not, I'm actually planning to do the same thing once I get my Vista laptop.

 

If the "Upgrade" will allow you to do that, it sounds like the best way. You may need XP still for certain apps.

 

Does XP do what you want it to do? Do you have any specific reason for WANTING to "upgrade" to Vista? If not, "just because it's there" isn't really a valid reason, and will almost certainly end in frustration, naughty words, a laptop used as a discus and tears Just kidding. But it's work you don't have to go through unless you really want to. And of course the Vista license almost certainly expires when you graduate.

 

there shouldn't be a problem - as far as I've heard, people have been doing this successfully. In reality, most people who have multiple OSes in different partitions only use 1 for the very vast majority of the time. I'm guessing that this'll be even more the case for 2 incarnations of windows. So it comes back to the necessity of it...but that's your call. Just keep in mind, if it's an upgrade and not a clean install vista, then you'll obviously have to put XP on the second partition first...

 

I agree with Pita. There is no reason to upgrade to Vista unless you have some need to it (which I can't see now). I always tell people to just take the disc, but don't install it. You may need it later, so keep it around. Just because you have it doesn't mean you need to install it.

Oh, and Pita's probably right; your license will probably expire when you leave the university.

 

I'm not worried about license's expireing. To clear things up, I want to install it to learn Vista now, so that when I get a new laptop/desktop(whichever comes first) I will not have to spend the first day to week learing the ins and outs of vista.
If in fact this is possible, the can someone tell me exactly how to go about installing Vista on a separte partition?
I plan to reformat and reinstall the OS on the partion that has XP before I proceed with installing Vista on the other. IF that matters at all.
anyways thanks for your help so far and I look forward to reading your post in the future.

awaiting your replies
Phillip

 

all you'll need to do is get gparted to create a new partition...or something like that...i'm pretty sure it automatically resizes NTFS without the need for defraging first. Then you'll need to install XP onto your newly created partition, so that you can upgrade it to Vista. It'd probably be useful to get some sort of boot loader, so you can choose which partition you want to boot to...but i've only had experience with those where it's done for you in linux...but i'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get the know-how...and that's about it...then it's off to vista-learning-land...hope this helps

 

@mnaah
that helps but theres one question I have for you:
If I already have both partions and I want to reformat the larger one(the one that currently has XPpro on it). Do I still need gparted?
And, to anyone that knows;
Is there some special program/driver that I need to dual boot XP and Vista?

 

as long as the file system on both partitions is NTFS and you're happy with the relative sizes, then you're sweet from that PoV...as for the bootloader, look at GRUB, but I don't have the know-how other than that's the place to look

 

On another forum (talking about cloning their harddrives):
USE VIRTUALIZATION. It will do everything you want. If you’re not familiar with what I am talking about, you can create a “VIRTUAL PC” *inside* your regular pc. You’ll have a complete working pc in a Pane inside your regular WINDOWS XP. Go get Virtual PC 2007. It’s from Microsoft now (bought from Connectix Corp. extreme amazing gurus.) And its FREE.

Run it. It will create a ‘HARD DISK’ file in a folder on your computer. Open it and IT WILL BOOT UP, like a regular PC. Complete with a screen, mouse pointer, hard drive, ram, modem, lan, internet, sound, and more. You can have it be another pc running Windows XP. Or..even more interesting, you could install windows VISTA on it and test programs to see if they work under VISTA. Or, you could install Win98 and test that. Or, make 2. or 3 of them, One can even be running LINUX. And the best thing is, if you screw it up, just drag that file of its hard drive into the trashcan and presto, its’ gone. Then make another one. Nothing can get out of there onto your real pc, so even if it had a virus in there, it would not affect your external real pc’s copy of windows.

You don’t need to reformat. You don’t need to repartition. You don’t need to buy another hard drive, if you’ve got lots of room on your existing one. Which it seems like you do because you’re saying you were considering making another partition of sufficient size to run another copy of windows on it.

In actuality, this virtualization is fairly well-developed now. And there are even ‘bundles’ that are downloadable for instance just download an iso of one of the ‘hard disk files’ and click it, and it would boot up with a fully configured ubuntu linux with hardened Smoothwall Firewall Router, KDE, X, honeypots, etc already installed in it and ready to go.

Tired or done with it? dump it. Time to experiment again…just make a new one! Really easy. Go try it. I’ll Save you some money there. And some time.

-TheAdvancedSpecialst

 

I don't want to make a new partion,I already have an unused one, and I do need to reformat.....system is crashing way too much and it's mostly because of Windows related programs. I'll look for Virtual PC 2007, and then when I reformat and re-install the OS, I'll be needing a step by step walk-through of the process. if it doesnt workout, I guess I'll go back to dual-booting.