XP in its own partition

Can I install XP in a partition on my current HD or do I have to reformat?

 

please elaborate a little. is the drive in question currently a boot drive with an OS on it? or just an extra storage drive?

Is there room for another partition, or would you need to install in the remaining space, or shrink the existing partiton?

Short answer, yes you can, more on how or what not to do when I find out what your situation is

 

My drive is 80 gbs and in use. My system profiler tells me that there are two partitions #1 Dell utility partition 39 mbs and #2 NTFS 76 gbs. I read that it is a good idea to put XP in a seperate partition so in the event of a system issue you could just reinstall the OS in the partition w/o having to reformat.

 

if it is your current system drive, you already have Windows (2000 or XP) on the 76GB partition.

I'm still not fully understanding your question, do you have 2000 and are uprgading to XP? or do you just want to reformat and reinstall Windows XP?

If you want to reformat, you'll going to have to make sure you have an XP full or upgrade disk and not just the dell recovery CD. Then you could boot to the XP disc, delete the current partitions, and make a new primary partition for XP, usually 20GB or so (leaving you with ~56GB for storage). this way, as you said, if you ever need to you can reinstall XP on the primary partition without losing the data in the storage partition.

 

But if I want to create a sperate partition for XP (20 gbs) that entails reformatting. Can I partition the drive without reformatting and losing everything on the drive. BTW what is the Dell utility partition?

 

the dell utility contains extra system properties that aid in the 'system recovery' process, should you use the recovery CD's to restore the factory default computer settings. they are not important if you have a windows disk and are comfortable installing an operating system and drivers manually.

you could create a separate 20gb XP partition, however there are some downsides. First, you'd have to use a partition managing tool like Partition Magic (which is now owned by Norton) to shrink the existing partition (since the existing ones occupy all the sapce on the disk), which often doesnt work correctly and corrupts the existing date. Should that work, you would have XP on 'partition 3', which would not be as quick as partition 1, and the OS would run more slowly.

It is always best to have the OS on the 1st partition. You're best bet is to backup the data you want to save, and wipe the drive clean, and then create the new OS partition and go from there.

 

I am not sure I have the recovery CD. I have the red XP CD for repair and reinstallation. If the OS is in partition 1 set at 20 gb will that 20 gbs be unavailable for storage? Is that why XP is in the same partition with eveything else?

 

you'll have the whole hard drive for storage, you just need extra room on the OS partition to store the Program Files.

I just called the 2nd partition storage in the long term sense, since you'd be abel to reformat the OS partition without losing the data on the other.

Thats good that your disc doesnt mention being the recovery cd, what you have is the actual windows disc they usually charge a bit more for.