How To Setup Dual-Boot on Acer Aspire

Hello Airywind, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Please go ahead and post a screenshot of your Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) window showing the full layout of your HDD. This way we will be able to give you the proper advice. :)

Thanks a lot!!
This is how the Disk Management screen looks :

You want to dual boot with win8, vista,linux or ......?

First step is to make C a little bit smaller so shrink it. Shrink it for example with 100GB so there will be 100GB unallocated space afterwards. Size depends on how large you want the other OS to be. Shrinking can be done in disk management. Just right click on C and do "shrink volume". If you can't shrink it enough, defragment C first.

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Airywind,

As Ron posted above, you want to shrink your C: drive by how much you want for the other OS to create unallocated space.

Partition or Volume - Shrink

Next, just create a new simple volume with the "unallocated" space to format it. It will be a logical partition afterwards since you already have 3 primary partitions.

Partition or Volume - Create New

Afterwards, just boot from the installation media of the other OS, and select the new partition to install it to. How this is done will depend heavily on what OS you are installing though, so please post back with what OS you are wanting to install for a dual boot first. This way we can help make sure it will go trouble free.

Brink said:

Airywind,
Next, just create a new simple volume with the "unallocated" space to format it. It will be a logical partition afterwards since you already have 3 primary partitions.

Partition or Volume - Create New

Hi Brink. As far as I know win7 makes the physical disk "dynamic" of you make a 5th partition.
He is making the fourth partition.. it should make it primary... are you sure win7 does it as you told?

update: You are right!! Sorry

If the 4th partition is created from Airywind's 3rd partition, then Disk Management will only make it a logical partition by default.

If he already had 4 primary partitions, then he would have to use a different method with Partition Wizard to create a new logical partition without converting the disk to dynamic instead.

Yeah, you don't want to convert the disk to dynamic.

Brink said:

If the 4th partition is created from Airywind's 3rd partition, then Disk Management will only make it a logical partition by default.

If he already had 4 primary partitions, then he would have to use a different method with Partition Wizard to create a new logical partition without converting the disk to dynamic instead.

Yeah, you don't want to convert the disk to dynamic.

Sorry, I did remember I was wrong already. Updated my post.

No problem mate. :)

Thank U all for the replies n wonderful support. :) As suggested, I did perform the 'shrink' on Drive C: and the maximum free space I could get was only 90GB. So I started with the next step. I wanted to install the Windows Server 2003 on the new partition first because I have a licensed copy and then upgrade to Server 2008 later on. But now I have another problem as the Server 2003 OS is not getting installed. I tried to install by booting from the CD but every-time I end up with a BSOD giving error code 0x0000007B with a message 'Inaccessible Boot Device'.
So now I have the partition created and I have the Installation disk for Server 2003 OS but I'm unable to install it. I read in one forum that 'since server 2003 is an older OS, the installation cannot happen'. However, I'm installing it on an entirely different new partition so I don't understand why it is not possible to install..