A week ago, I installed the Windows Vista Beta 2 onto my computer. Why, you ask, didn't you install it when the beta actually came out? The answer is that I was worried about partitioning my computer to allow XP and Vista to run side by side. I have a lot of data that would cause me to become insane if I lost it. Thousands of lines of code, hundreds of pictures and graphics, and numerous other files scattered around my computer (the Vista backup system is much needed by me).
Finally, I centered my sights on a partitioning program called GParted. Basically, it's a completely fabulous partitioning program built on a tweaked version of the linux OS. All I had to do was download the live CD image, burn it to a CD, and boot from it. It takes about a minute to set itself up, loading the linux OS into memory along with the included software. The actual partition control panel is extremely easy to use. It creates a "graph" of your hard drive showing you all of your partitions and their respective file systems. I just right-clicked on the XP partition (formatted in NTFS) and selected "Resize/Move". From there, you can just drag the edge of the partition on a graph to make it smaller (or larger). Then, I created a new NTFS partition in the empty space for Vista. Finally, I just rebooted into XP and let it run the "check disks" program and I'm ready to install Windows Vista. No corrupted files, no lost data. It was so easy, I decided to tell the world about it here, and I think you will enjoy the simplicity this program offers.
You can find the GParted homepage at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/. There you can also check out screenshots. You can find numerous ISO burning programs on the web such as MagicISO at http://www.magiciso.com/.
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