Dual booting help.

Alright everyone, I am going to need some help here when I explore this uncharted territory. The bottom line is I would like to switch over to Vista over the summer, but I still want to keep XP for compatibility reasons. So, I have a bunch of questions about dual booting.

1) I am assuming that I need to install the different OS's on different partitions. Is this correct? What size do they need to be?

2) Is it possible to set up RAID when you are dual booting, do I need to set it up on both?

3) Where will my documents, music and pictures be? Would it be easiest to keep them on a third partition?

I have a bunch more, but these are some of my main concerns, especially concerning RAID. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

1) Yes, you will have to make a second partition for Vista. Ideally, you should give Vista slightly, more than half of your hard drive space, and XP slightly half. So if you have a 100GB hard drive, give 60 to Vista and 40 to XP.

2) Yes you can have RAID when dual booting. And there is no choice. You either have RAID or you don't, you can't have like 1/2 of a RAID.

3) This is the only thing I'm not sure about. Hopefully someone else can chime in.

 

Yea, I know, just wanted to make sure I could set up RAID. So would I need to install the RAID software for both XP and Vista?

 

By software, I'm assuming you mean drivers? If so, then yes, when you start the install of Vista on the second partition, you'll have to provide the RAID drivers.

 

Yes, I mean drivers. So I can install XP and then provide the XP drivers for RAID and then install Vista on partition #2 and provide the Vista RAID drivers?

Thanks for the help BTW!