Partitioning - Vista & XP

[Brendanhurley]

Hello,

I have read alot of threads on many forums and have came to the conclusion that are specific enough to my problem. I have a dell inspiron 6400, with vista pre-installed. I decided that vista wasn't really up to my musical (recording) needs and chose to use XP once again (which definitely is 10x faster with my software). I now have XP and Vista on two seperate partitions on the same hard drive. This might sound stupid, but as there was only four primary partitions available, and all four being used by vista, bootsector(?), dell media direct and recovery, I decided to get rid of recovery as that was the largest available space. I also managed to shrink some of vistas partition using diskpart. I can now choose which OS I want to boot into at boot.

Problem is, XP partition is only 10 gig in size, and to the right of it is Vista weighing at 90Gb, and to the right of that is another 10Gb of unallocated space. I tried GParted, but halfway through moving this space (moving vista to the right) I discovered a note saying that this would probably destroy vista, which I would still like to keep. The vista partitioning tool is useless on top of all that.

Is there a way I can move Vista to the right, to allocate the space to XP? And also, If I were to shrink vista using gparted (following their instructions) wouldn't this unallocated space be automatically assigned to the right anyway?
Thanks very much, and please correct me if I'm wrong anywhere, I'm new to this. :)

Thanks again.

 

[brush3287]

I'm no expert in partitioning however, I think your main problem is that as Vista was there first (so to speak) it effectively stops you from moving it - which is what you seem to be needing to do.
I don't know if long standing tools such as -Partition Magic or Partition Manager can get around this issue, but I think I have a similar problem, albeit with Windows98 & XP, and I'm coming to the conclusion that to get rid of 98 and release more disk to XP, I'm going to have to Fdisk the drive and start all over.
This type of approach may provide you with some problems.
1. Warranty-which you've probably already invalidated anyway by getting rid of the recovery partition - but check with Dell just in case they have some flexibility.
2. If you've got a Vista disk plus the application disks for the other non MS s/w apps - the recovery CD's will be just disk images, then you're in with a shout. It just becomes time consuming.
3. If you do go to all this bother you might want to try out virtualisation s/w so that you can install OS's without the need to partition disks all the time.
;)