Vista/XP over noncontiguous partitions

[Bartman99]

New Dell laptop came with Vista installed on single 160G SATA drive. They
created 4 partitons:
1) 78M (FAT) EISA Configuration (for BIOS I think) - Hidden drive
2) 10G (NTFS) Vista Recovery image from Dell - Drive D
3) 136G (NTFS) Vista OS - Drive C
4) 2.5G Not sure what this one is for - Hidden drive

I want to install XP in dual boot mode so I had to delete partition 2 since
I can only have a total of 4 partitons. I then shrinked partiton 3 to 100G
(97.66G). So it now looks like this:

1) 78M (FAT) EISA Configuration
- Free 10G - Unallocated space
2) 97.66G (NTFS) Vista OS - Drive C (working)
- Free 38.82G - Unallocated space
4) 2.5G Not sure what this one is for.

When I install XP, will it use the 2 free partitons (10G + 38.82G) as single
48G drive D (even though the unallocated partitions are noncontiguous)?

Thanks,

 

[andy]

New Dell laptop came with Vista installed on single 160G SATA drive. They
created 4 partitons:
1) 78M (FAT) EISA Configuration (for BIOS I think) - Hidden drive
2) 10G (NTFS) Vista Recovery image from Dell - Drive D
3) 136G (NTFS) Vista OS - Drive C
4) 2.5G Not sure what this one is for - Hidden drive

I want to install XP in dual boot mode so I had to delete partition 2 since
I can only have a total of 4 partitons. I then shrinked partiton 3 to 100G
(97.66G). So it now looks like this:

1) 78M (FAT) EISA Configuration
- Free 10G - Unallocated space
2) 97.66G (NTFS) Vista OS - Drive C (working)
- Free 38.82G - Unallocated space
4) 2.5G Not sure what this one is for.

When I install XP, will it use the 2 free partitons (10G + 38.82G) as single
48G drive D (even though the unallocated partitions are noncontiguous)?
No.


Thanks,