****How to: Install Windows Vista on a separate Partition****

Okay, a lot of people have been asking on this forum how to install Windows Vista on a separate parition along side their XP install so that in case anything happens with Vista or they decide not to upgrade when the Beta program is up in June next year, they're not left without an OS. I too was in this same situation back in June when I downloaded Beta 2 and decided to dual-boot with my XP install. After all, this is still just a beta OS, and shouldn't really be used as anyone's sole Operating System. So after doing a lot of research, I came upon what seems to me to be the easiest, safest, and most efficient way to dual-boot Windows XP and Windows Vista. In this guide I will provide step by step details, and maybe even some pictures if it becomes feasible. Hope you enjoy.

Step 1
Okay, the first step is to defragment your hard drive. The Windows disk defragmenter isn't the best, but it should be good enough for these purposes. Just click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter . What this will do is make sure all your files are organized and not scattered about the disk which could result in data loss when you create the new partition.

Step 2
Now, you want to actually create the parition on which you will install Vista. There are several software options which you can use to do this, both free and commercial, but I've found the best option to be the GParted LiveCD. This is a Linux LiveCD that features a basic Gnome interface with the Gnome Partition Editor built in. You can get it here. Now, to create the partition, simply restart your computer and boot from the CD. Different computers required you to do different things in order to acheive this. But the best bet is to go into your computer's BIOS and find the option that asks you which device you would like to boot from, and change it to CD/DVD drive.

Now you will boot into the GParted LiveCD environment. It will ask you some basic information about your computer... the defualts are usually the best option. That is up until you come to the part where it asks you whether you would like a full-service Xorg Server module or a mini Xorg server. I would choose the mini option. It won't look as nice, but I've never gotten the full-service interface working on my computer, so I would just be safe and save some time. You can still get around. When the Live OS finally comes up, it should show you a window with some information about your hard drive on it.



In most cases, you will have one large Windows partition which will be represented by a long bar with an ntfs filesystem that should represent nearly as much space as your hard drive size. Depending on your computer, you may have another parition on the drive. What you want to do is right click on the bar, and there should be an option to allow you to resize the partition. Do that, and a window should pop up that looks like this:



In the box that says "New Size (MB)", you should calculate the amount of space in MB you want to allocate to Vista and subract that from the amount in the box. I would recommend 20GB at the least for Vista. Assuming this you will need to express this in MB, or multiples of 1024: therefore 20GB=1024*20=20480MB. So subtract that number from the number in the box, and type the result into that box. Then click the "Resize/Move" button. It won't do anything to your hard drive just yet. To do this, you'll need to click the "Apply" button at the main window. The progress dialog box will open and it should resize your hard drive. This will take a bit of time depending on how big your hard drive is and how big you decided to make the partition. If you encounter an error... I have pity on you. You may be fine, or you may have completely nuked your hard drive's contents. So be warned. It VERY rarely happens, but it is possible.

Step 3
Okay, the next step is a little fuzzy. Some people say that you can go ahead and create the new partition now, but I like to be safe. Your best bet is to restart your computer (click the button in the bottom right of the screen that looks like the Windows 'Turn off Computer' button, and select 'Eject & Reboot') and let Windows boot normally. It will run the Chkdisk utility because it knows your hard drive configuration has been changed. Just allow that to run through. ***THIS IS IMPORTANT*** This is Windows' way of making sure nothing is wrong with its filesystem and none of your vital files were lost in the process of resizing the partition. It will look like this:



When Windows finally boots up, you can then pop in the GParted LiveCD again and boot from it as in Step 2.

Step 4
Now you want to create a new partition in the space that you removed from your XP partition. There should now appear a bar in the GParted window that says "Unallocated Space" and is the size that you removed from your XP parition (in my example's case 20GB). You want to right click that area and select "New." This should take you into the "Create New Partition" dialog box:



The options of "Free Space Preceding" and "Free Space Following" should usually be left alone. Changing these is really going to be for power users who probably don't need to read this guide anyway. Also, the "New Size" box should have the size of the partition you want already filled in (in my case 20480MB). But if for some reason it doesn't, then fill it in with your Vista partition size. Click the "Add" button, and then click "Apply" as before. The process dialog box will again pop up and GParted will perform the requested operations.

The next step is a little fuzzy as well. Here you can choose to go ahead and format the partition to NTFS or just leave it. Either way should really be fine since Vista should format the parition on installation anyway. But just to be safe, just go ahead and right click the new partition's box and select "Format to" and click NTFS. Then, as always, click "Apply" in the main window and let it do its thing. Once it is done, you can restart your computer as in Step 2 and boot into XP normally. Some will say that you should boot from the Vista DVD to install it, but that isn't the easiest way to do it.

Step 5
This is where relatively easy, but nonetheless nervewracking (for noobs anyway) part begins. This is where you install Vista. When XP boots up, just pop in the Vista DVD. AutoRun will start and will bring up the following dialong box:



Go ahead and click the "Install Now" button. You should be asked a few questions, but they're pretty simple. When it gets to the part where it asks you where to install Vista, select the partition you just made using GParted. The acutal drive letter will vary depending on how many other partitions and optical drives etc. you have on your system. But you will probably just have a choice of two drives... C: and another partition. Select the other partition. The C: is where your XP install is, so it is very important that you don't select this drive.

From here on out, the rest is pretty much up to Vista. The install will take some time depending on several variables such as hard drive speed, processor speed, etc. But the typical install will take about 30-40 minutes and the computer will restart several times. When your computer boots, you will now have an option to boot into Windows XP "Earlier Version of Windows" or Windows Vista "Microsoft Windows Vista."

With RC1, driver support is pretty good. If a driver isn't included on the DVD, there's a pretty good bet that you'll be able to get it via Windows Update as soon as Vista boots. So now I leave you to explore the beauty and the madness that is Windows Vista. If you have any more questions or run into any problems, just post it up here.

Photos courtesy of:
gparted.sourceforge.net
www.updatexp.com
winbeta.pl

 

good post will test soon, but as you mentioned there are other windows partioning softwares... which ones are more "common?"

 

^ probably Partition Magic, which costs $$.

GParted is the only (good) free one.

 

As iza said, Partition Magic is probably the most common software, but it costs money. Quite a bit as I recall. Another solution is Partition Logic, but I've never used it, so I can't speak of it. I just don't like the UI as well, and I haven't heard anything great about it. Also as iza said, GParted seems to be the best free solution.

 

Nah, no matter how fragmented your disk is, it will never result in data loss. If it does, you seriously need to find better partitioning software. That is one of those things that must not happen, just like data loss when defragmenting. (Apart from everything else, there's no guarantee that the defragmenter will even gather all the data into one big cluster at the start of the partition. It might just defragment individual files, but leave them scattered around the disk)
However, defragmenting *might* allow you to partition the disk faster, since it'll have to move less data. But most likely, the total time taken would be less if you just partitioned without defragging.

Here, I'd say the opposite is probably safer. I'd expect both to work, but Linux support for NTFS isn't all that solid, so I'd feel safer leaving it unformatted, and let Vista do its things from scratch.
But as I said, both should work fine in practice.

 

Well, this may or may not be true. Everything I've ever read has said that it is a good idea to defrag the hard drive before partitioning. I can say that I have partitioned my hard drive both after a defrag and again without doing a defrag prior. I didn't have any problems either way, so that's an indicator that it's not that important. And it is true that GParted should not destroy any of the data in creating its partitions. However, no everything always works as its supposed to, so I'd just rather be safe than sorry.

Now this is a good point. Linux is notorious for not having great NTFS support, but in my experiences and as you say, both options should work fine in practice. In fact, during installation, you could still probably tell Vista to format the partition anyway. The only reason I say to use GParted to format the partition is because it will make your partition appear in Windows when you start up... not important at all, but just more convenient.

 

True, except you're still not really safe. Most defragmenters don't bother to stack all the data in one end of the drive, so you still have data scattered all over, so if something went wrong, you'd lose data in any case.

 

Touche on that one as well.

 

I just setup a computer few weeks ago with windows xp and some programs, and i wanted to make a 2nd partition for vista, my question is would resizing the c:\ drive to make room for a 2nd partition cause any problems for the c:\ drive i.e program errors or such. Im just wondering if it would be better for me to just reformat the entire pc and recreate partitions, but if I can just resize with no side affects, then thats better.
thanks

 

Hey notebook_fw, how did u take screenshots while things were installing ?

Also, do u know if its poosible to install windows after linux has been installed and still boot into linux, or does the windwos install screw up the boot menu ?

 

You SHOULD not have any problems. I have reformatted, resized, created, destroyed, and even moved partitions using GParted several times now and have never encountered any problems. But, you should be aware that it is always a possibility. You should definitely back up any really important data that you have just in case. I don't forsee any problems occurring, but you never know when a computer is gonna fail. On my old laptop running Ubuntu, I did have a problem with my CD-ROM, and it failed in the middle of Ubuntu paritioning the hard drive. Therefore, I could not complete the process, and my hard drive was screwed. I had to completely reformat it, so it's just straight Ubuntu now. This was due to hardware failure on a 5 year old laptop, not due to the software, but like I said, stuff happens. Be prepared. If you have a new computer, you shouldn't have any hardware failures such as I did.

 

All of those screenshots were taken from sources on the web, not me. I imagine they were doing this in a VM, as that is usually how you accomplish those types of screenshots.

Installing Windows after Linux will screw up Grub for sure. It happened to me. After I installed Vista RC1 on my M90, I could not boot into SUSE, so yeah, you'll have problems. You're supposed to be able to repair GRUB from the SUSE DVD, but I never could get it to work for some reason, so I gave up and just use the partition for data now.

 

thanks, resized partition and got xp as primary and vista on 2nd partition, cool...