Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm gonna give this Windows 7 thingy a whirl, and need to separate my hard drive into two partitions, what software should I use to do this?

You don't need software.

Just make sure you have back ups of everything on your computer, because to partition you need to wipe the entire drive.

Partition Magic?

Is there one I don't have to pay for/pirate?

You can do it as part of the setup process for XP/Vista. Probably also Win7

Aha, I've never installed windows on anything other than a fresh hard drive before, cheers.

When it asks you which drive you'd like to install to, you can play around with partitions then - but you will have to clear whatever partitions are set up.

I've never found a free one that'll create you a new partition without losing all the existing data. Then again, I never bothered trying the ones where you create a linux ISO, boot from that, then do it.

Well my C: is currently one partition with 60gb or so free space, can if just resize the current partion, and create a new one in the free space?

Yes. You'll get two empty partitions, though. It won't keep your existing data.

Eep! I want to keep XP about for the meantime!

Not tried in many years, but that was possible, but you'd be extraordinarily foolhardy to try it without taking a backup of all the data you want first. Also having good technical knowledge about such things was useful. I seem to remember there being a friendly gui on top of fdisk, which made it easier.

Mmm. you may wish to investiage something like this page, but I obviously can't vouch for anything there.

Gparted is the answer. LiveCD here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

As Mr Dave says, you should back up first just in case. I once had Partition Magic barf and eat my partition table when I had no backup. I had to rebuild it by hand with a tool which scanned the drive for things that could be the starts of partition entries, a calculator, and a disk hex editor. It wasn't much fun.

I've managed to resize my partition now, and got 40gb unallocated space, you think that'll be ok? Or do I need to format it before install if I want to keep my other partition in tact?

No, it'll be fine. During the Windows 7 install, point it at the 40Gb of free space, tell it to make a partition, then format it, and target the install there.

Afterwards you'll have to do... something... to make WinXP bootable again. I have no idea about that bit, as all my dual boot machines run Linux (or OS X I suppose) so I use the Grub bootloader to choose OSs. When dual booting multiple versions of Windows you can do some stuff to the boot.ini file. The WIn7 installer might do it for you, even. Others can advise you better.

No you won't. The Win7 installer will see the XP install and create the bootloader for you. It'll sneeringly call it "Older version of Windows", mind.

Ta!