Dual booting Windows 7 with Windows Vista

Amid all the drama surrounding Windows 7 Beta being offered as a free public download, I got hold of one copy and a product key. Very anxiously I sat down to partition my Windows and opened the disk partitioning tool provided in the Vista. But this is what it showed me when I tried to shrink my C: drive:

Even though I have 15 GB free on my C: drive, disk partitioning tool is not allowing me to shrink it at all. After doing some research, I found out that it may be because my hard disk is configured as a basic (or static) disk. OS can change space allocations only in dynamic disks but to convert a basic disk to dynamic one means wiping everything out and reinstalling again.

This led me to the discovery of a wonderful partition editor called GParted, which is a free but powerful partition application. It is available as a bootable ISO image (called LiveCD) as well as a bootable USB version (called LiveUSB). USB version seemed to be the obvious and easier choice and it was a breeze to download and setup on my flash drive.

Follow the steps outlined on the How-To Geek blog to partition your disk using GParted. I encountered no problems partitioning my disk using GParted though I had to repair my Vista afterwards because partitioning process renders your main OS unbootable. Nothing to be worried here as you won't lose any data and whole repair process can be easily performed using a bootable disk for Windows Vista installation.

After partitioning, it was a breeze to install Windows 7. So far I am thrilled with Windows 7 and pretty sure that it will prove out to be a much better deal than Vista, if nothing else.