morgs

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ok, here is the problem:
I want to partition my hard drive so i can dual boot, but for some reason i just cant. It wont let me!
In the hardware manager it displays no free space at all!!! and I am at a loss as to what to do???
I'm running:
AMD 3300
XP PRO SP2
40GB HDD
512RAM

Any help will be greatly appreciated
thanks

Oh, btw i have tried a partition manager and defragged the drive etc etc but im sol

wolf68k

Try Partition Magic click here or try the demo click here for demo.
I don't the limits of the demo, but I wouldn't expect much.

Ryan

just delete all of the partitions and start over from scratch... it's hard to repartition a drive when there's already data spread across it (like yours probably has)

boot off of a boot disk, and run "fdisk" for fat32 partitions

for NTFS partitions, just run xp setup and set the partition size smaller than your hard drive..

what are you dual booting anyways? linux? if so, use a linux partitioning program in the linux setup (depends on what installation you're using)

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wolf68k

No it's very easy to re-partition a drive with data on it. That's what Partition Magic is for.
You can use it to take the free space of an already full single partition drive and split it off for a different partition in a different format. You can use it to reformat another partition to something that Windows can read and then, if need be, merge it with main partition making it full again.
The last 2 parts I've done myself, no problem, even done the merge with other FAT32 partitions that had files on it and the files were perfectly fine.

mattjh

You need to do this outside of Windows BTW.

Phildo

What OS's are you trying to dual boot with, Linux, Windows, BSD?

You're going to have to start over from scratch to do it smoothly.

My suggestion is:

1: Wipe the entire drive.
2: Create a partition for windows, NTFS file system. I would say use ~20Gb for windows.
3. Install windows on that ~20Gb partition and leave the rest unformatted for now.
4. Next install which ever OS you plan on using, if this is your first time with a new OS then I suggest Fedora core 3.
5. Try to make the linux install take up ~20Gb as well, but there will be three partitions in linux, boot, swap, and root.
6. A cool thing to try with a dual boot is a shared partition between the OS's but you're going to need another drive to pull it off. Hard drives allow up to four partitions primary and extended. So if you buy a new drive you can create a FAT32 partition (linux cant write to NTFS easily due to legal issues, yet)(unless you want to mess with some experimental support, but i would't suggest it.) this way you can read files from both operating systems, but you have to be sure to set fstab up correctly to allow linux to read/write as user to make it nice and smooth.

if you understood that, go ahead and try the dual boot, if not stay away from a dual boot until you know linux better.