Dual Boot Questions

I'm about to convert my computer to a dual boot system with vista home premium and XP Home, and I am in the final setup stages and wanted some advice on the final outcome.

My primary question involves partitioning of the drive. Attached is an image of the disk as it is now. My original plan was to give XP a 16-20 GB partition, Vista a 60 GB partition, and the rest would be converted to a partition that holds all my music, videos, etc (essentially everything that is currently stored under C:\Users\me) to be accessed by both OSs. I thought this the best system as my files would be safe in the event that Vista or XP crashed and had to be reimaged. Another plan I thought of was to just make a 20GB xp partition and just access the vista partition to get to my files.

Btw, the XP partition is going to be used primarily to house programs and games that give me trouble under vista. I only play single player games, and tend to delete them after I finish playing them.

For those of you with experience with these setups, what do you guys think? Any issues, problems, or concerns I should have? Will programs have any problems with the moved directories? (e.g. If a program is told to access Downloads\example and I move the downloads folder to E:\Downloads would the program be redirected or would it still try to look at C:\Users\me\downloads\example?)

Two more questions:
1) Is it wise to move the pagefile to the recovery partition? It has 6GB of free space that's not being used.
2) What's the deal with the 86mb and 2.5GB partitions? They have always been there and I have yet to ever see them being used.

EDIT: I have 30GB of music, videos, and documents that would be moved.

 

vista admin tools in control panel similar to xp...vista allows you to shrink your C:\ drive making two partitions...16-20gb for windows xp is not going to cut it for what you want to do...for a XP basic set-up your gonna need 10-20mb for the O.S. and drivers...depending on what kind of basic services your going to be using...Windows Xp need about 20% of free disk space to operate smoothly...after you start pushing past that 20% window...your XP partition will frag quite easily...the more you push it past that 20% the worst it will get...eventually...your XP O.S. will take a crap...and your XP O.S. partition won't even boot...

 

deathstick,

There is no problem moving those download folders, most of the time, when the program cannot find the path, it will prompt you to select a path, you can also configure the default download path in the program settings.

For the pagefile, it would be wise for both OS to share the same pagefile. I'm currently doing the same with the dual-boot Vista/XP. There is no point of having two pagefile.sys files, it's a waste of space, pagefile is like a scratchpad for the OS, there is absolutely no problem sharing it. Just make sure you set them the same size in both OS. If the recovery partition have that much free space, yeah there will no problem putting the pagefile there.

The 86 MB EISA partition at the beginning of the drive is a partition set up by your notebook manufacturer to store some utilities that can be used without booting into the OS. Since it's only 86 MB, you can leave it alone if you like. But of course, it is not something necessarily to have. Actually, EISA standard is quite old, I'm not even sure why some manufacturers still use utilities that support it.

lol why scare people like this? It is not even true, even at 10% free space, your XP can still run fine. Yes, the XP defrag utility does require about 16 or 17% free space to defrag properly. But in deathstick case, 16-20 GB will be more than enough since he said he will be only running a game or two.

 

You can throw music, movies, etc to anywhere you want. Aslong as its not a system file. Its just like storing stuff on a external HD.

Of course youll need to redo your playlist on winamp or whatever program you use.

 

Dual booting offers best of both worlds.
Make sure you put on XP FIRST then Vista.

 

Not true, you can install either one first. I installed Vista first on purpose.

 

I have Ubuntu and XP in my other laptop and it's working as a charm