[AlpineOne]

I want to partition my hard drive to [eventually] set up a dual boot with XP. The problem is, I have the Home Edition (Premium) that came pre-installed on a Dell 1420 so when I use Vista's Disk Management, I only have the option to create simple volumes (logical drives) and not primary partitions.

I was hoping somebody could recommend another partitioning utility, preferably free because I only plan on ever partitioning this one time. I don't regularly partition drives and I only want a dual boot so I can play games on XP, so I don't really want to pay $50 for a utility that I'm only going to use once. I thought about the Acronis demo, but it says you can only create "minimum-size (7 megs I think?)" partitions so that doesn't seem helpful. Any suggestions?

[Elvandil]

What's the current situation? Do you have unallocated space? Can you boot from the Vista DVD and partition with that?

Be sure to run chkdsk and defrag before partitioning. Then chkdsk again after defragging. File system errors are not a good thing during partitioning.

Partitioning Tools-->

Free:

CloneZilla GParted LiveCD (Complete partitioning and drive imaging/restoration tools)
Gparted LiveCD
Parted Magic
Vista Recovery Disk (Shrink, expand, create, delete partitions)
XP Recovery Console CD image (Create and delete partitions with diskpart.exe)
Partition Logic
Ranish Partition Manager
Cute Partition Manager

Shareware:

Paragon Partition Manager
Paragon Hard Disk Manager
Terabyte BootIt NG
Acronis Disk Director
V-Com (Avanquest) Partition Commander
EASEUS Partition Manager
7Tools Partition Manager
Spotmau Partition Genius

[AlpineOne]

the situation, as it sits, is 3 primary partitions and one unallocated space that I intend to use for XP. I didn't think about using my Vista DVD, so I'll try that when I get home tonight after defragging.

[Elvandil]

Get a command prompt and use diskpart.exe.

[AlpineOne]

I decided to take a brief hiatus from my foray into dual-booting after setting up my partitions, expecting things to be fairly straight-forward from there when I came back. As usual, things are never that easy, and I've hit another road block.

When I boot from my XP cd to do the install, I get the error message "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer. Make sure any hard drisk drives are powered on and proper connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct. Etc etc." I have to quit the Setup via F3, and then it reboots into Vista.

Did I miss a step somewhere in configuring my partitions? What gives? If it isn't obvious, I'm brand new to this sort of thing and a lot of the tutorials on dual-booting seem to take some things for granted that aren't so in my situation, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Elvandil]

What's the make/model of your machine? You may need to load a driver if you have a SATA drive.

[AlpineOne]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1420. Yeah, yeah, I know.

I poked around over the weekend and read that I have to disable the SATA configuration in order for XP to recognize my partitions? If that is the case, my question is this: can I re-enable it after XP is installed? I've never played with this kind of stuff before, so it's all new to me.

[DeBug]

You can do it without disableing your Sata configuration! Just go to your HDD Homepage and search for your HDD's Sata Drivers, after you find and download them, you just put them into any Floppy or a CD. After that take a reboot than put your Windows XP CD and while running on Blue Screen at bottom-left of your screen you will see an info about SATA than when you see a "Press F6..." you just click F6 and countinue your Windows Setup...

[AlpineOne]

Since I don't know who makes my HDD, do I just use the XP SATA driver provided on the Dell website for my 1420? If so, some of the drivers I have downloaded from there run program installation-type utilities to install the driver when you open the .exe; is that going to be a problem if it's loading from a cd on the blue screen?

[Elvandil]

Yes, you will need the driver to be all ready for installation, with the inf file and driver files unarchived and accessible. No exe is going to get opened in that environment. You may be able to find the bare driver in a floppy image download or extract the files from the exe.