Partition and dual boot

I just purchased Disk Director. I have a 250 gig primary HD (and two others). It has 57 gigs used because I have 35 gigs of downloaded vids on it. I would like to make a second partition which will include the downloads. In other words I want the partition sizes to be 30 gigs and 220 gigs so that I can make an image file with true image that is smaller in case of crashes. Is it possible to do this or will I need to move the downloads to another HD first.

I am also considering a third partition to try out Vista ( am running XP). Is it simple to do?

 

Since you are going to be changing your partitions, I would recommend you have a good backup of your drive (a True Image backup, for example) before you begin. That way you can restore and start over if something goes wrong.

If you want to leave an @30GB partition to try Vista, then it should work to do this:
Resize the 250GB partition as small as it will let you.
Create a new NTFS Primary partition (for Vista). Make it small, about 1GB.
Create another partition in the remaining unallocated space for your videos and downloads.
Once the partitions are created, copy the downloads and videos from the first partition to the new videos/downloads partition.
Then, assuming the copy goes well, delete the files from the first partition.

Now you should be able to resize the first partition smaller (hopefully, closer to the 30GB you want). Then resize the Vista partition larger (to the left) to use the unallocated space left from shrinking the XP partition.

You should end up with partitions like this:
[XP NTFS Primary @30GB][VISTA NTFS Primary @30GB][NTFS Downloads/Videos ?? GB]

 

Thank you!!
That was the most clear and simple explanation I could have hoped for and it makes total sense. I assume if I dont want to try out Vista I can still use the same procedure: Make a second partition...move the downloads there.. and then shrink the first (XP) partition.