Thanks for your comments. I might consider installing Vista Beta 2 on a
separate hard disk as the code in this OS may not be fully stable. However,
I feel that I should still be able to dual boot Vista Beta 2 and XP on the
one HD. Having read other posts, I'm not going to make the Vista primary
partition active as it might not allow me to dual boot OSs. The only doubt
or confusion I have left is that I read in some Microsoft article that a
system partition is required in a PC startup. Microsoft refers to this as a
primary partition that is make active in which you can boot to. However, if
I go ahead with my dual boot strategy, I won't have any system partition as
none of the primary partions will be made active in order for it to work
properly. I have included a dual booting link @
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/t...sta-179906.php.
It's not great but it is ok. It uses the third party PM software. However,
it mentions nothing about making one of the primary partitions active which
is good.

Anyway, any other suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks,

Martin

"AJR" wrote:

Martin - Just a few comments - I am sure you will receive more specific
responses. However to format a drive properly you should understand the
differences between active, primary, extended and logical partitions (not
including FAT or NTFS file systems);
An OS cannot be installed on a logical (not active) partition - data can.
In a dual boot scenario (other than server based) you can access data via
both OSs but it requires applications that use the data to be installed on
both OSs.

I have not evaluated your proposed procedure - my recommendation would to
install another hard drive.

"Martin Healy" wrote in message
...
The hard disk on my PC consists of a 20 GB primary partition and the rest
is
logical. Windows XP came preinstalled on my 20 GB primary partition. My
aim
is to dual boot XP with Windows Vista Beta 2. I want to create another
separate primary partition for Vista Beta 2 and a additional partition or
logical drive for my data. Also, I want to be able to access my data from
both operating systems. I'm not too sure about doing this but I may
attempt
to carry out this dual boot procedure using the steps below:

1. Using the Windows XP Disk Management tool under Computer Management, I
will right click the logical drive and space and select delete from the
context menu. This should convert this to free space.

2. Next, I would right click this unpartitioned or unallocated free space
and select New Partition from the context menu. From here, I would select
a
primary partition, create a 30 GB size and format it using NTFS
accordingly.
This partition or logical drive will be used to install Windows Vista Beta
2. More importantly, should I mark this partition as active ? or is not
necessary as Vista will sort this out during the actual installation of
Vista
on this partition later on.

3. Then I would create a new logical drive for my data using the remaining
space.

4. Finally, I would restart the PC from my Windows Vista BETA 2
Installation
DVD, enter setup mode for that OS, and select the 30GB primary partition
to
install Vista Beta 2.

Please note, I will not be using the Windows XP setup and fdisk tools to
partition my hard drive in this case as my PC came preinstalled with XP on
a
customised 20 GB partition. Also, other third party software such as
Partition Magic are not available to me.

Please correct me if the above steps are incorrect as I'm not too sure how
to employ this dual boot procedure. I'm not sure whether to make the
Vista
partition active or not in step 2 above before proceeding with the
installation of Vista at step 4. At completion, I would like to be able
to
choose which OS to boot from at PC startup when presented with the boot
manager loader menu. Lastly, is it possible to change order of the boot
menu
using Vista's BCD (Boot Configuration Data) menu which is the equivalent
of
XP's Boot.ini file.

I would welcome any assistance from anybody out there.

Thanks,

Martin