Dual Booting my PC, Question

[Kaiga]

I have done a search for this and I have found nothing.

I recently obtained Windows Server 2003 and I am wanting to dual boot it on a PC of mine which is already running Windows XP. (not my sig PC btw.)
(note: I have done dual booting before, just not while I already have an os on the drive.)

The problem is that I don't want to have to reformat my drive and create new partitions in order to dual boot. Is there some way to partition the unused space on my hardrive so I can install Windows Server 2003 without losing data, or having to back up, and without having to buy an expensive program such as Partition Magic.

In the near future however, I might even want to use more free space on my drive to do a multiboot, meaning I want to be able to boot Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Kubuntu Linux.

Anyone? Ideas and help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[IanG]

You could use partitionmagic (or other similar tools) to resize the existing partition and then create a new one to install the new OS on to. Make sure you've backed everything up before resizing the partition just in case something goes wrong (I had a power outage while resizing once and lost a bunch of data.)

Another option would be to use VirtualPC or VMWare to create a virtual computer. It's a little slower, but a lot easier than constantly rebooting.

 

[Kaiga]

So what you're saying is that there is no tool in windows that I can use to do this sort of things? I have to go and buy partition magic? I might as well just backup and reformat then because I don't want to go spend $70 on freaking partition magic.

 

[IanG]

correct, there's no built in utility to do this. I think there's some freeware alternatives, but I've always had a copy of partitionmagic so haven't researched them.