Help With Partitioning?

[Psychosis84]

Ok I need some assistance. I am trying to partition my harddrive so that I can run XP on my current Vista running laptop. I have read a few articles about how to do this, the one I am going with discusses using GParted. I am having issues with GParted so I am looking for a new way. I found out that Vista has a Disk Management program to resize partitions, so thus no need for GParted.

Well in the article I read about installing XP onto a Vista computer I ran into this line:

Do you already have a free partition or a separate physical disk that you can install Windows XP to? If so, skip on to the next section. If not...

- Use the partition manager to shrink the partition with Windows Vista to make enough room at the end of the drive for Windows XP.
- Add a new primary partition located after the Windows Vista partition you just shrunk. Make sure it is a primary partition and formatted as NTFS.
- Reboot

It's very important to make sure that this partition was created at the end of the drive, or else you might no longer be able to boot into Windows Vista because your partition numbers have changed.

Since I'm 100% new at this whole partition thing... this kinda confuses me. What is the END of the drive?

When I go to the disk management program in Vista to look at my drives I have 2 partitions:

( C: ) 220.58GB NTFS Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
HP_RECOVERY ( D: ) 12.30GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)

So this is where I am stuck... Obviously I have to alter my ( C: ) partition, so I have to shrink that to make unallocated space, which I can then format. Now that does seem rather straight forward, and it very much could be but this at the end of the drive thing confuses me. How do I know if this unallocated space is at the END of the drive, what does that even mean?

BTW this is how I am going to manipulate my paritions just incase u wanna know: Windows Vista Tips & Tricks: Resize Partitions

 

[Psychosis84]

No one can help?

 

[peterhuang913]

Looks like we missed one, sorry.

The end of the hard drive means to make the new partition after shrinking the existing one.

 

[Trotter]

I use Partition Magic for all my partitioning needs. It does a killer job.

 

[forrestcupp]

When you look at the graph, the free space needs to be on the right side. That is the end. It's like reading from the left to right. If the free space is on the left side, that's the beginning of the drive, and that isn't what you want.

Honestly, GParted makes this pretty clear when you're doing it. You have a lot more control with what you do. Maybe if you told us what your issues are with it, we could help you through that.

Trotter is a big fan of Partition Magic, but it costs money.

 

[Psychosis84]

I went to the GParted website and downloaded it... when it downloads you get the ISO which needs to be burned onto a CD-R to open... so I did that, and it worked... but when I ran the .exe nothing happens. So I'm just not using it.

 

[KSoD]

Download the LiveCD. Burn that ISO to a disc and reboot the machine with the LiveCD in the tray. It will work then.

 

[peterhuang913]

You boot from the CD.

 

[forrestcupp]

also, you can't just make a data CD and burn the file to the CD. You have to do an image burn with the iso. Then, like they said, boot to the CD. You may have to change the boot options in your bios if it doesn't boot to the CD.

 

[KSoD]

Burning ISO Images to a CD or DVD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

Instructions on how to burn a ISO. Just in case you dont know.