First...thx for all the info here. I've read every single post on this thread and now believe I may have saved myself a lot of grief by doing so. Mr. Wilson: you are a very patient & giving soul, indeed.
I suspect that an answer to the following question(s) will help quite a few people here....
Please confirm that I will NOT be able to set up a dual boot on my new system (or....if I actually CAN, then tell me where I can send a large bottle of your favorite adult beverage!)...
Have brand new HP Pavillion model a6257c. Specs are available here:
HP Pavilion a6257c Desktop PC - Product Specifications
It comes with Vista Premium Home installed. No Vista CD is included (don't get me started....letters are already on the way to HP & M$ for THIS insidious omission). I did however, make Recovery Disks (2 dvds vs. 15 cds that it said it needed.), whatever those are. I doubt that they include a full Vista install, but could be wrong.
I do own a legal XP Pro w/ SP2 CD, however, and have the product key handy.
According to HP, there are NO XP drivers available for this machine. They also state that, while MS supports "going backwards" from Vista to XP, HP does not. So not finding XP drivers for this machine on the HP web site comes as no surprise. However, the other odd & unusual thing is ASUS, the MoBo maker doesn't seem to have a manual or drivers or anything for this MoBo on their site either. This is odd. They've always been very supportive in the past.
This is a 64 bit duo core with one SATA HD. Not sure I read some posts right, but this may be yet another reason that a dual boot set up won't work on this machine.
No problem using Vista to re-partition. It was quite EZ. This is what I ended up with:
Note: All 3 partitions have the same Layout, Type, & File System. That is: Simple, Basic, and NTFS.
HP (C
Healthy (Primary Partition) >aprox. 172 GB size
(This is the volume I shrank to create the 3rd partition....for XP)
Factory Image (D
Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) > aprox. 9 GB size
New Volume (K
Note that this drive letter was necessary due to all the removable media devices that came built in...I could have chosen A or B (and still can change it, of course), but feared that would cause problems. >aprox. 117 GB size
I formatted the New Volume.
That's where I am at this time, and fear proceeding. From all the reading & research I've done, it would appear that I'm out of luck on creating a dual-boot on this system.
Do you agree???
If so, can you instruct me how to return the C: drive back to it's original size?
If you disagree, then please tell me how to obtain XP drivers that'll work with this machine, and how to proceed from here.
Thanks so much for all of your efforts here. As a newbie, I'm very impressed.
Chris