Hi sseyler,
How you proceed depends on what you know have setup, but yes, what you want
is quite possible and is in fact not that difficult.
If you have free space available (unpartitioned) on the drive, run
diskmgmt.msc and create a new partition for the x64 installation. Or you can
skip this and allow setup to do it. I would recommend that you have at least
8GB of space allotted for the installation. If you already have multiple
volumes on this drive, then you can simply install to one of them and can
skip the repartitioning altogether.
If you do not have free space available, you will need to use a third party
partitioning program (see below) to dynamically resize the existing drive
without destroying the existing installation. This is not something you can
do with the drive tools included with Windows. Once you have resized the
existing volume, you can create a second one from the free space, or again
allow Winx64 setup to do it (and actually I would recommend that you let
setup do it).
Then, boot with the x64 CD and run setup making sure to choose the alternate
volume as the installation location. Setup will add the existing
installation to the boot menu automatically, so you should not have to do
anything special to create a dual boot scenario.
Partitioning programs:
BootIT NG
www.terabyteunlimited.com
Partition Magic
www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic
Partition Commander
http://www.v-com.com/product/pc_ind.html
Ranish Partition Manager
http://www.ranish.com/part/
I would recommend the first one (known as BING) as it is shareware, but all
you will need to do is create the floppy and boot the system with it. Then
cancel out of the install and you will have the maintenance menu where you
can examine the drive and do the resizing and repartitioning. You will not
need to purchase it, though I heartily recommend that you do if you plan on
doing additional work on drives like this. Be aware too that these steps
take quite some time, they are not instant so be prepared to let the
routines run - sometimes for several hours. Do not interupt them once
started as it may result in corruption that is not recoverable. Before you
do anything, backup that which is critical to you as a precaution, all drive
work of this nature, while normally safe, carries with it the danger of loss
of data.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone
Windows help -
www.rickrogers.org