Dual boot advice for VGN-FE11S

[timauluck]

Hi there,

Can anyone please tell me what’s the best way to partition a Sony Vaio VGN-FE11S in order to dual boot? I've currently got Windows Vista Ultimate x86 SP2 installed (bought back in March 2014 along with Office 2007 Pro and upgraded from SP1) which I deleted all the partitions for Windows XP Media Center 2005 as part of the recovery partition in order to format the drive and to install the later OS as I backed up the original OS and drivers onto 2 seperated recovery discs back in February 2006 when I got the laptop, I used the preinstalled Sony Recovery Manager in XP to create the recovery discs for the original OS and drivers. I basically want to dual boot the laptop with both Windows Vista Ultimate x86 and Windows 7 Ultimate x86 as the second OS so I can begin testing drivers for Windows 7 so I am prepared for the OS migration next April as Microsoft will stop supporting Vista around this month. Your help would be much appreciated.    

Kind regards,

RocknRollTim

P.S. I may also try Windows 8 Pro x86, Windows 8.1 Pro x86 and Windows 10 Pro x86 as part of my testing for dual booting as the second OS once there is an official trial for Windows 10 Pro x86.

[timauluck · Accepted solution]

Update

Unfortunately there is no easy way of going about this apart from starting from a clean state which will require deleting all volumes using the OEM media i.e. Windows Vista and allocating this OS with 80 GB of space out of the 160 GB hard disk space which is installed within my laptop and not using the recovery media that came preinstalled with the laptop. Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 will need to be installed alongside using separate OEM media and allocated the same amount of space as Windows Vista.