Vista - Trying to Partition My "C" Drive

Hi, I am new to Vista. I have just bought a Dell Inspiron 1525 with
Vista Home pre-installed and with 250GB.. I would like to install
Windows XP also so I can dual boot my laptop. I went to an intensive
search and read a lot of articles on this. And the 1st step I have to
do is to partition my "C" drive so I can install Windows XP on it.

When I open my Disk Management, I saw two partitions, one is for the
"Restore CD" while the other one is for my Vista. I could not find any
"Unallocated Space" partition which allows me to install XP. And I try
to shrink the "C" volume but the size I could shrink is only "658MB".
I called Dell and they were not able to help me because all I got are
people from India and most of them have no idea how to do it. I went
to several forum and found that I can use a 3rd party software to
partition my drive, which is "Parted-Magic-LiveCD". I download it but
it is in "iso" format. I burned it onto a CD and got four files, but I
am new on "iso" format and have no idea how to open the file and
installed the program.

So now I have several questions:

1. How can I access to the "Unallocated Space" on my "C" drive
without using a 3rd party "Partition software"?

2. How can I shrink my "C" drive so I can set up another partition
with at least 20GB for my XP?

3. If I have to use "Parted-Magic-LiveCD", could someone tell me how
to install it from the files I installed (which are on my HD now as I
copied them from my CD).

Any kind assistance is much appreciated.

PS: Another question, is there a way I can complete wipe out my Hard
Drive and install XP on it instead? I really don't want Vista!

Thank you.

Thomas

I was able to create a new partition in my hard drive which is
titled : "E" and is a Logical Drive. After I booted from Windows XP
disk, the Setup said "It could not find any hard disk drives installed
in your computer" and could not continue the setup. There's no
partition listed underneath the Setup Menu (where I choose to Install
or Repair". Could someone tells me what went wrong? Does my new
partition has to be a "Primary Partition" as well? If so, how do I
change "E" to become a "Primary".

Any kind assistance is much appreciated.

Thank you.

Well, presumably you were able to solve the problem with using GParted by burning the ISO file to a CD by using some sort of CD burning program that would do that (unlike the built-in CD burning feature of Vista.) Now you need to get your Vista pc to recognize the hard drive when you try to install XP in its partition. Most likely, the pc came with a SATA drive rather than IDE, and WinXP came out too long ago before that happened and so the installation CD does not recognize your hard drives. One thing you can do, if you have a floppy drive on your computer, is to use the F6 function key early in the setup process to have the hard drive driver read in from the floppy. Most likely you do not have a floppy drive (modern computers usually don't come with them, which is a shame, because sometimes they're necessary.) So then you should the free program NLite to slipstream your SATA driver into your XP CD-ROM, as explained on this page:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...-installation/