to partition or not to partition

D

de_Genova

New Member
Could someone please give me some advice/instruction? I have a Toshiba Satellite M50 laptop Home Ed XP (European model in the Italian language -- absolutely non-changeable to english. I would like to have my XP in english and I do have another XP pro disc in english. I was going to load it in a seperate folder on the C drive, but I am not sure enough about it so I stopped the intallation.

If I do load it in a seperate folder would I get a prompt on bootup to make a choice or would I have to go directly to the new folder and start the XP professional from there?

I was given to understand that if I were to partition the Toshiba (if its possible?) I would lose everything, which I don't want to do. Can you help me. I owuld like to load them side by side as long as they wouldn't interfere with each other and I don't lose anything in the process........Thank you very much............PDeGenova
 
If you are able to shrink the current primary there you can create a new second primary for a dual boot or both editions. The XP installer won't custom install the English version into a second folder but will simply replace the existing installation.

That would be the Windows and DocumentsandSettings directories as well as Program Files. Your best option would be to backup anything you wish to save to see the current version removed which may or may not require reformatting if you are unable to create a second primary. This will void any warranty however.
 
DIROGA.......and PC eye.............well I did do a parallel install of the Windows XP in a seperate folder alongside the Home Edition but most of what I would have used from that process, such as help etc still comes up Italian, and I wanted things in English. I will have to resize and/or partition the drive. Should I do it from Recovery Console?
If I can resize perhaps I wont have to erase everything huh?

I don't really have the extra $$$ they want for the resizing software online. Any sugg's out there on what to do and if so is there any good freeware that would help me out?
 
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First off i cant really see any point in duell booting windows XP and profeshional on the same system as they are basicaly the same, Just upgread your XP home to XP profeshional.

If you want to have two operating systems on on computer what you want to to id "duell Boot" the operating systems. this means that you have two operating systems on one hard drive or computer.

To install two operating systems you can not just install it in a "new folder" there is a bit more to it but its not that difficult.

Each hard drive is made up into partitions. by the sounds of it your hard drive just has one partition. What you can do is instead of having one partition on your computer you can create two but each partition would then be hald the size. You can then install an operating system in one partition, and another in the other partition.

The best thing to do is use a program to resize the current partition you have on the hard drive so you are left with enough space to add a new one. Download a free program called "Gparted" and burn it on to a CD. it is a lice CD that can do all this for you.

Good luck!
 
The only time I ever saw two versions of Windows run on the same primary was when custom installing 95 and 98 together. With the old dos shelled Fat based versions you could renamed the 98 folder to Window98 or something like that where it would add 95 as a boot option. Have fun trying to install programs however!

Since that time the installer will generally delete the current installation in order to be the dominant OS. Vista will compress the current installation of even Vista into a Windows.old folder for saving files and data before deleting it.

If the installer is prevented from replacing the Italian edition then you can go for GParted live for cd if you have a cd writer or dvd burner. The first thing however is to know that only a few releases of GParted are "platform independent" and work on more then just Linux partitions. The last release of that type is the 0.3.3.0 version found among 40 others at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828 being #27 from the bottom #15 from the top on the page there.

Besides the free drive tool a free version of some iso burning capable program will be needed like BurnOn found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/ DeepBurner is another freeware capable of burning the 35mb iso image onto a bootable cd-r. But you first want a look at how GParted works. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/generalities/gparted.htm
 
@de_Genova to clarify

You have xp home Italian installed and you want to have XP pro English installed. You want to keep XP home. You want to use XP Pro more than home.

You said you installed XP pro to a folder. Did you install the normal way through boot off of the CD? When you boot what version of windows are you in? You say it is in Italin, which is the home version. you can do this start>run>"winver" to see what version of windows you are using. It would be strange if you were in pro and the laguange was Italian.

I have seen several install of windows in the same partion using different windows folder names: WINDOWS1 WINDOWS2, WINDOWS.000. You can edit the boot.ini file in the C: to beable to pick from different installs of windows to boot from.
 
AznPride83 said:
Don't partiton, you're going to have like 26 drive letters, lol.
Click to expand...

Where do you get that from? By simply splitting a drive into two primaries only one additional logical drive is created. That will at first offset the drive letters seen for the one or more other drive including optical until reassigning the drive letters in the Disk Management tool.
 
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