I have a WD 640GB HDD for my new build. I plan on installing 3 or 4 OSes to this drive. I have WinXP 32bit, WinXP 64bit, and Vista 32bit.

I'm wondering how I should partition my drive. Ideally, I would like to install a game (primary use of this machine) on a neutral (non-OS) partition available to all OSes. I don't know the feasibility of this, however. WinXP 32bit will probably be my primary OS, because of compatibility and resource use.

Also, can I make each OS partition invisible to the others? I would like to avoid my wife / kids from using the various partitions and it would be less confusing for them.

What do the experts here think?

My thoughts - sure somebody else will be along soon to correct me if I am wrong...

I'd give each partition 50 GB - that's 200 gone

You've got 396GB left - so 100GB for shared programs across the 4 OS's and 296GB for data be it movies, mp3, photo, digi cam video, whatever.

To get the games to work on all OS's I think you're going to have to boot into each OS and repeatedly install each game over the top of one another in the same location on the data drive - reason being to ensure that registry changes etc are made that the game will need to run.

Nothing springs to mind re making the partitions invisible to one another... all on the same physical disk so can't disable it through system settings on each OS.

Would you have a problem with the swap file size, would there be enough space?

Why do you need 50gigs for an OS partition? Wouldnt 10 suffice?

Partion your drive equally. Also Vista does not like to share a comman drive with xp, not in the least, it tells me with my comp that it cant and refuses to let me even look in the 1 paritioned drive I wanted to use to share between the 2. 10 gigs isnt enough for xp, the os itsself can eat up 8 gigs without problems, and if you want to be able to defrag, you need atleast 15% of your drive space free before it lets you, also keep in mind vista capable programs will want to be kept with vista to get the best experience for the user.

I second keeping the partitions equal in size and NOT making a undersized partition for your OS, any thought of gaining increased performance by moving swap files here or there is futile. You won't notice any difference in performance, but you will most likely encounter a problem down the road.

As an aside, if you want to hide your pr0n from your SO or your kids by making invisible or encrypted partitions, don't do it. Keep that stuff on a removable drive, if you have so much that it will not fit, get an eSATA HDD.

Its uncanny that vista wouldn't be compatible with xp(cough,cough)...instead of offering drivers for vista it declares that your item(camera,soundcard,etc.)is obsolete,and needs to be replaced.And every new computer you buy(nubs)you'll have to fork out another zillion just to run a simple app like micr*soft word...is just me or do others see the herd off the cliff theory.Best of luck with your endevers,post how it turned out,some of us always need a good chuck'l...gl

Lol Vista isnt compabatible with xp....yet but service pack 3 promises to enable us to share files between xp comps and vista comps. I really hope thats the case, my fiance likes to download anime and i like to run vista, but have to kick into xp to view it on my own computer through our network.

Keep it simple. Install Vista-64 in one partition. Is there anything that will not run on it??

Vista 32 has 1,500 compatible programs....XP has 35,000

Hijack Warning!!!

Whoa - what do you mean you can't share files on a network? I'm in the process of getting a new laptop, need to add it to my wireless network, and file sharing (with XP machines) is a must. Tell me more about this issue / non-issue. Will be happy to take the discussion elsewhere if we need another thread.

There's one big misconception about installing 4 OS's on 4 partitions .... somehow peeps thing that is one OS dies, the others are still working. Problem is, if installed as most do, part of every one of those OS's resides on your C partition (boot.ini) and without that nothing is booting.

"Back in the day", the folks at PowerQuest had a little utility that came with "Partition Magic" which actually did truly isolate one partition form another. Symantec bought PQ and this product sits in the doldrums. What PM allowed you to do was create a teeny little DOS partition (or FAT32) which contained your boot menu. After a menu selection, PM actually hid all the other OS partitions and unhid the one you selected in the menu. I did a lot of builds this way "back in the day" with Win98 on Partition C(1) for the kiddies and NT4 on C(2) for moma and dada to do work. When the machine was booted, it would default to Win98 unless one selected NT4 on a menu and I'd set it to about 5 seconds to make the choice. So if kids turned on machine, they'd go into win98 and play games.....they couldn't get to the NT4 partition if they tried because it was "invisible" and not accessible (not to mention it was NTFS).

Problem is Vista doesn't like PM. Once you do any formatting with Vista, PM ain't gonna work so you'd have to use one of their competitors. Now if you create all the partitions with PM and then install Vista, I'm told by peeps that have done it that it works fine....unless you let Vista format anything on that drive.

In the OP's case, if I was doing what you are doing, I'd use one of these options:

1. Hyper OS
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

2. Something equivalent to this
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTk3

As for partition sizes.....in the situation above I always had all OS's share the same page file. It's a simple enough procedure well described on numerous web sites. This let me have up to 3 OS's if one of them was on a FAT32 partition and 2 OS's if I was doing NTFS and needed that 50 MB DOS boot partition. That was because of the 4 primary partitions limit on a HD.

-OS1 (FAT32) / OS2 (anything) / OS3 (Anything) / Extended Partition with various logical partitions
-Mini Boot Menu Partition / OS1 (NTFS) / OS 2 (NTFS) / Extended Partition with various logical partitions

I have XP partitions of 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB on various boxes here.... the smaller you make it, the more you need to move stuff off to other partitions. I do OS's on C*, D gets swap and temp files, E usually gets programs, F games and G Data.

-Every program install must be "custom" so you can make it go somewhere besides C:\ProgramsFiles.
-Swap and temp files need their own home
-You need to make e-mail go somewhere else
-Nothing goes in C:\MyDocuments

As for the placement being a non issue, just think about it. The two most accessed file groups on your puter are your swap files and your temp files. Your HD can move about 118 MB'sec at the outer edge, and about 69 at the inner edge. Simple question.....you want it moving that data closer to 118 or 69 MB/sec ?

Lock your temp and swap files in on a D partition right behind a small C partition and you gonna be very close to 118....forever. With just one big C drive, on day 1 you will see no difference between performance between default windows install and with a separate swap / temp file partition. Just don't try to compare them on Day 365. On day 365, with 500 GB of space filled on your HD, you new temp files and swap file is gonna be thrust out in 75 MB/sec territory while if you had it on it's own locked in partition at the front of the drive, it's still performing at day 1 speeds of 116 MB/sec.

Its pretty simple really, vista uses a diffrent service then xp does for the tc/ip connection and right now they are not compatible. When SP3 releases in july if MS doesnt screw us, then there will no longer be a problem. But for now they cannot share the same network, it sucks i know, but a fix is on the way.

To the original poster, I dont really have a clue as to what jack is exactly trying to say here so ill let ya know how i got a multi boot os off my comp. I first installed xp, fully updated it, then i used the device manager to create the partition to install vista into, started up vista, pointed the correct path out to it, and presto dual boot, no hassle works everytime. Hope that clears up and confusion you may have. Waaay too much detail there. As a side note I let vista defrag the drive its in, and dont have any problems.

Yes, use GRUB to configure multiple partitions.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

Is there a problem if i wanted to have XP on one HDD, then install Vista on a completely different HDD, and boot that way? I know i'd have to change my boot order each time i wanted to boot into XP/Vista.. correct?

There's almost a scent of panic in the air...And you thought micr*soft was your buddy...wake up... grind it up a smell the latte.

Ok, the consensus seems to be make equal size partitions, the Vista partition will not play nice with the others, and I can't make the other OS partitions invisible.

Last night for my first set up, I went with 3 100GB partitions for OSes, and the rest as one large data partition. Is there a performance / stability benefit from changing them around before I do any more?

Also, I realize this will not prevent everything from failing if one fails. I just wanted clean installs for the separate OSes I'm installing.

I would just suggest 4 hard drives, if your motherboard supports it, you can have the boot menu show up and just boot off which harddrive you want when starting. If one HD fails no big deal. My old a8n sli deluxe has this option. Keeping them isolated and seperated is best.