How to: Create a partition in Vista for W7 dual boot - Overclock.net

dralb · 01-11-09

OK, some people have been asking how to set up dual booting Vista and W7 Beta. I was bored and decided to post this quick walkthrough of how to do this.

Right click the computer tab. Select manage>storage>disk management. Once you can see your drives and partitions, you need to right click a partition that has some free space. You need at least 16gb for W7 iirc, so it is best to make it a little bigger than that (all up to you depending on how much space you think you'll need and/or want)

You then select shrink volume. Choose how much you want to shrink it and continue. Once the volume is shrunk, you simply right click on the unallocated space and choose to create a new volume. Run through the prompts and voila, you are all done. Boot from DVD and choose the new volume to install W7. You will then be prompted at start up as to which version of windows you would like to load.

dralb · 01-11-09

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dralb · 01-11-09

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sav5716 · 01-11-09

I'm guessing this differs in XP? Great tutorial though, +rep for your time and effort.

lhowatt · 01-11-09

it wont let me create large partitions even though i have 80gb free

dralb · 01-11-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by sav5716

I'm guessing this differs in XP? Great tutorial though, +rep for your time and effort.

Yes. You can't shrink partitions in XP. All you can do is delete and recreate them. You can, however, use 3rd party apps. I have never tried them with XP, so not exactly sure how it goes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lhowatt

it wont let me create large partitions even though i have 80gb free

What does it say when you try to shrink the volume? I have never had that issue, but I don't recall if I ever shrunk my boot/system volume. I have, however, shrunk other volume on the same array and added to it.

lhowatt · 01-11-09

it says size of available shrink space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are enabled on the volume and i can only make a 2.5gb partition

Vicarious · 01-11-09

To resize XP partitions you can use GParted. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Polska · 01-11-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by lhowatt

it wont let me create large partitions even though i have 80gb free

The Vista partition creator wouldn't create a pratition for me at one point because I had system files which were "in the way" (I think it takes the space from the end of the disk up to however much is free). I did a defrag with perfectdisc which moved everything to the front of the disk then I was able to make the large partition.

If you use osomething like parition magic I believe it does this for you (but don't quote me on that).

Quote:

Originally Posted by lhowatt

it says size of available shrink space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are enabled on the volume and i can only make a 2.5gb partition

Ya you can also try disabling pagefile and system restore temporarily to see if it then lets you make the partition then.

dralb · 01-11-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by lhowatt

it says size of available shrink space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are enabled on the volume and i can only make a 2.5gb partition

Do you have a huge amount of pagefile space set up? Lemme do some research and see whats up. I have not had that happen to me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Polska

The Vista partition creator wouldn't create a pratition for me at one point because I had system files which were in the way (I think it takes the space from the end of the disk up to however much is free). I did a defrag with perfectdisc which moves everything to the front of the disk then I was able to make the large partition.

If you use osmething like parition magic I believe it does this for you (but don't quote me on that).

:thumbs:

I bet that's it. Makes sense.

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How to: Create a partition in Vista for W7 dual boot

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