Hi,
I take it you purchased an upgrade disk? They are not designed for clean
installing by booting the disk, and you can no longer simply insert a
qualifying media disk as proof. You need to start from within a working
installation. A Vista Home Basic disk will not upgrade XP Pro, it will only
allow a custom install to a new folder and will not carry over user
profiles, settings, and programs.
As to partitioning, once installed Vista's disk manager (diskmgmt.msc) can
be used to shrink the system volume, and then you can create a new one from
the resulting free space. One issue you may run into is locked files, as it
will not be able to shrink a volume beyond the point where one exists.
You could also use a third party tool like BootIT NG or Acronis' Disk
Manager to repartition.
Another option is to use the well known workaround of installing Vista
twice, first without, then with the Product Key. The first time just boot
with the disk and redo the volumes during setup at the point where you
choose the installation location. When prompted for the Product Key just
click next and select the version of Vista that you have a key for. Once
installation is finished, reinsert the Vista disk and do an in-place
upgrade, this time using the Product Key. Be aware that at some point in the
future, activations of this sort of bypass may be blocked but currently they
work fine.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
Windows help -
www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts
http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com