[ThreeDollaBills]

Alright, as much as I hate asking people for help, I finally talked myself in160's IDE for sometime now. I currently decided to upgrade to a 750gb HD SATA. I'm going to start with a new copy of Vista x64 and also a new copy of XP Pro x64. What is the best way to approach this situation? Vista first? XP first? Anybody have a good way of doing this so I don't end up having to format this huge HD more than once? lol. I'm wanting to put three partitions. 250GBX3 one for both vista and xp. The other for storage.

[Elvandil]

Make your 3 partitions. XP first. Then Vista and Vista will create the dual-boot menu.

[ThreeDollaBills]

How do I make the Partitions? or should i say with the XP Disk? with the Vista disk
bios?

[crjdriver]

First do a little bit of thinking as to how you want to configure the system. Do you want just the basic os in its own partition with 1 partition for apps? An example of this would be xp in the first partition, vista in the second partition, and install apps to partition 3.

I like to keep each os completely separate so I install the os and apps to the same partition. As an example I dual boot win2k and vista. Vista is installed to C with its own version of office and other apps. Win2k is installed in D with its own version of office and other apps.

Once you decide on how you want to do this, then you can make your partitions. Install xp first; during xp setup, create the three partitions. Make C for xp and I would use a min of 20gig for xp. Make the next one at least 30 for vista. Make the last one the rest of the disk. Note you can modify these sizes if you are going to install large apps, store data files in the same partition as the os, etc.

Note I highly recommend having a second physical drive for backups, image files, etc. It is not a question of whether your hd will fail, it is a question of when it will fail.

[Elvandil]

If you have no partitioning software, you can create the partition for XP during installation and leave the rest of the drive unallocated. It is preferable to use this method, anyway. Install XP. Then, run the Vista setup and create your partition for Vista, leaving the remainder unallocated again. Install Vista.

After both are installed, you can use Disk Management in either OS to partition the remaining space and assign a drive letter as you choose.