Partition hard drive.

[NaughtyMonkey]

Ok so I have to hard drives in my computer. one has xp on it, the other has vista. Is it possible to partition one of the hard drives into two halves while windows is still installed and it not affect it or will I have to reinstall windows.
Thanks.

 

[PC eye]

Depending on how much free drive space is available you would first shrink the Windows primary to see a second partition created in the then unallocated drive space freed up when shrinking the C volume. Depending on which version of Windows is on the drive will have some effect. If this is for the XP drive you can use the Disk Management tool in Vista or use a 3rd party drive partitioning tool like Partition Magic(retail) or another like the free Linux drive tool GParted(Gnome Partition Editor)>

For Vista the option seen for shrinking the system/boot primary is limited where you would use mainly a 3rd party drive tool for seeing the primary reduced in size first. From there that can also see a new second partition created or simply use the DM to see a new one created as well as formatting it as a new logical drive.

With both Vista on one drive and XP on a second sata here configured for a dual boot or reinstalled at times to see two separate stand alone installations the one effective tool for even seeing a Linux distro added into the mix is GParted. The links below are for downloading the 0.3.3.0 or 0.3.2.0 "platform independent" releases able to create MS type partitions as well as one for the documentation and instructions with screen shots for how to use the free tool.

For the cross platform releases you have to scroll down about 15 different versions to find the two mentioned at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

The general documentation is seen at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/generalities/gparted.htm

Some additional screen shots can also be looked over at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

You will need to burn the iso type disk image onto a cd-r not rw type disk and after boot from that since it runs live from cd-r. A few good free or free version programs that work well with iso images are BurnOn, the new StarBurn, and DeepBurner.