Dual booting OS's on a laptop ?

[Phat Momma Hoe]

Right, I've just purchased a rather nice XPS 1710 which ships with Vista Premium on it. Due to me living in 3 different properties at the moment I'm after some gaming to pass the evenings away.
Working on hearsay as I've not actually used Vista myself I was intending to dual boot XP Pro on it for playing games until the few problems Vista has are ironed out but I must confess I'm not compleatly sure how to go about it on a laptop. Done it on desktops many a time but this is new ground for me.

Having never owned a Dell laptop I'm unsure whether the recovery data for reinstalling are on the HDD in a separate partition or if they come on disk.

Asuming its on disk, do I just reformat and partition the HDD to whatever is suitable. Install Vista on C: and then XP on D: or vise versa ?

However, should the recover data be on a partition already, how do I go about making a 2nd partition to install XP without the risk of losing the recovery data in the original partition ?

God I'm getting old, used to not worry about such things and just get on with it and then fix it when I messed it up

 

[mattyj1085]

The recovery stuff is usually on a hidden partition check size of drive see if there seems to be some missing, personally i'd back up the drivers and relevent software that it shipped with then format it all and delete all the partitions and then create 2 new ones one for xp and one for vista , as long as youve got the drivers backed up theres not much else you will need.

 

[Phat Momma Hoe]

Yes that was my train of thinking too, if memory serves me rightly if the recovery data is on the HDD then it normally asks you if you want to make a hard copy to CD.

If thats the case, I'll burn that off then format the lot and re partition.