Create Disk Partition / Dual boot?

[Lee]

Question: How do you create a disk partition in Vista Home premium if the
disk is not dynamic? I would like to install a trial version of Windows 7 to
see if business apps will run.... and would much prefer to keep all of that
on a seperate partition with option to boot either Win7 or Vista... articles
or professional advice on pros and cons desired...

 

[Hank Arnold]

Question: How do you create a disk partition in Vista Home premium if
the disk is not dynamic? I would like to install a trial version of
Windows 7 to see if business apps will run.... and would much prefer to
keep all of that on a seperate partition with option to boot either Win7
or Vista... articles or professional advice on pros and cons desired...

I've never heard of creating partitions requiring that the drive be
dynamic. I do it all the time with Basic drives.

Sounds like you want to resize/shrink the existing drive space and
create another logical drive. You need software to do that. There are
plenty of programs to do that, paid and free.

You might just consider getting another drive. They are *REALLY* cheap...

--

Regards,
Hank Arnold
Microsoft MVP
Windows Server - Directory Services
http://mypcassistant.blogspot.com/

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Question: How do you create a disk partition in Vista Home premium if the
disk is not dynamic? I would like to install a trial version of Windows 7 to
see if business apps will run.... and would much prefer to keep all of that
on a seperate partition with option to boot either Win7 or Vista... articles
or professional advice on pros and cons desired...

The disk not being dynamic is irrelevant.

You can easily create a partition if you have available unpartitioned
space. You apparently don't have that space, and all your disk space
is used in whatever partitions you already have. So what you want to
do is not simply *create* a partition, but *reallocate* the
already-partitioned space to have one additional partition.

To do that, you need third-party software. There are several choices
to do this, and the most popular is Partition Magic. However bear in
mind that you would need to spend about $60US for Partition Magic. You
could buy an additional hard drive of about 160GB for less money than
that, and I think that would be a much better choice.

And one final point (question): what business apps are you concerned
with? In my experience, almost everything that runs on Vista also runs
on Windows 7 (I'm running Windows 7 RTM here) without a problem. The
only exceptions I've seen have been a few utility programs.

 

[Tom Ferguson]

To add but little to ground covered by Hank and Ken:

You have two basic choices: Add a physical hard drive and use that for
Windows 7 or if there is sufficient available space on your present drive,
shrink that dive and partition it and use that for another volume. None of
this requires dynamic volumes.

Also, you have the choice of using Windows in-built tools or 3rd party
tools. In most circumstances, using the in-built tools is cheaper "(for
obvious reasons) but the 3rd party tools can be easier to use. Also, there
are some circumstances when the Windows tools cannot provide a good solution
since they are more limited.

Assuming the route of having enough available space on the present HD and
the use of Windows tools:

Go to Control Panel Administrative tools Storage Disk Management
Right click on the HD in the list and select Shrink Disk on the context
menu. Follow the prompts.

After the disk is shrunk, right mouse click on the space and choose to
create new volume. Follow the prompts. (allow a drive letter be assigned and
allow a format). OK out. A new primary partition will be created with NBTFS
format is you follow the defaults.

When the HD drive/volume has been shrunk and the new drive created, restart
the machine.

Install Windows 7. I would start the install from the original OS and choose
a new install if both OSs are either 32 or 64 bit. This will keep the drive
letter assignments consistent between OSs.

As always before disk operations, make sure all your user files are backed
up. Also, that you have good back-ups of your OS and application programs or
the installation media is available and usable.

Tom Ferguson

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Lee.

As Hank and Ken said, you probably need to shrink your existing partition
and create a new partition in its place. You MAY need 3rd-party software,
as they suggested, but it depends on your existing disk system.

Are you familiar with Disk Management? It has been a part of every version
of Windows since Windows 2000 and gets more features with each successive
version. There are several ways to run DM; my favorite is just to click
Start, type in "diskmgmt.msc" and press Enter. You'll need Administrator
credentials, of course, since this utility allows you to make some serious
changes to your hard disk system - and to USB flash drives, optical drives
and just about anything else that can be assigned a "drive" letter.
Maximize the window so that you're no working through a keyhole. By
default, the top of the screen shows the Volume List; the bottom shows the
Graphical View.

In the Graphical View, right-click in your Drive C: and see if it offers to
Shrink Volume. If it does, try to shrink it by at least 20,000 MB. (That's
~20 GB, of course, but DM deals only in MB and if you ask for 20, you won't
like the results.) That should leave you with 20 GB of Free Space,
sometimes called Unallocated Space. Right-click in this Free Space and
choose New simple volume, then format it (NTFS, of course) and assign it any
available drive letter.

If Shrink Volume is not available, or can't shrink by as many MB as you
need, there probably is an unmovable file near the far end of that volume.
In that case, then, yes, you will likely need 3rd-party help.

Or, as Hank and Ken suggested, it may be cheaper to buy a new 500 GB HDD
than to buy the software to manage your existing disk space. ;<)

(I see Tom just posted what I said - but I've already got it typed, so here
it is. Enjoy!)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64

 

[Lee]

Thanks much to all you guys.. your input has been helpful...I have a 500 gb
drive and over 300 of it is free, so I plan to shrink etc per
instructions... the 3rd party software I am wanting to test under Win 7 does
not run in Vista 64 bit environment...

Thank You again
Lee

 

[Lee]

Success!

Everything went without a hitch...and that speaks to the quality of
instructions

All the best,
Lee