dual booting problem

to Saltgrass. unfortunately that option is not in True Image. i believe it may be in one of the other Acronis apps but not sure.
to Ted Myers. i had thought of that option, but was uncertain whether it would work, hence my request for advice here. if what you say will work, i assume that after doing the resize of Xp partition, creating a new partition for win 7, i would boot into Xp to perform the rest of the tasks? another option i thought of was to reduce the size of the XP partition to approx the size of my old drive and image back both XP and 7 to the one partition. if it does the same as before, it should auto partition that partition in half, leaving the free space to the right, as it is now. i could then delete the win 7 partition i have atm, merge all free space how i want. would that work, do you think? how about the 'primary partition' question? anyone able to tell me that, please?

Whatever you created the partition with made it a logical partition. Some are set up to do that by default and it was not corrected. Windows 7 will not create a logical partition on a drive unless there are already three and you are not using the remainder of the space for the fourth.

I would not leave it as logical, but it will work. I believe Partition Wizard will convert it to primary if you want.

ok. first job, i changed win 7 partition to 'Primary'. next step, i resized the XP partition while i was using win 7. next, i booted from Acronis recovery disk to see if the partitions were visible on the HDD. unfortunately, they are not. Acronis only sees the whole HDD, no partitions. so my idea appears unworkable. i am assuming, therefore, that your method wont work either, Ted Myers. i know i can always resize win 7 partition, leaving the freespace either at the front or the back of that partition. if i put thw win 7 partition at the back, it will leave all the free space between the 2 O/S partitions. will that be ok to then merge them? will either O/S then boot ok, or will there be any delays? if i put win 7 free space to the back of the partition, will i still be able to merge the 2 lots of free space when there is an O/S partition inbetween them?

When you resize your XP Partition, it should leave unallocated space at the end with XP at the front. Do that, then Image the XP partition (new smaller size. I would perhaps leave about 50 Gb for XP)

Once you do that try to install and run Partition Wizard from within Win 7. It should see the unallocated space ahead of it. You might be able to complete in one step by just moving Win 7 into that unallocated space, but probably not. From Within Win 7 extend the Win 7 partition forward to reclain the unallocated space in front of Win 7. Now Image the Win 7 partition.

Next use Partition Wizard to resize the Win 7 partition to say 75 GB or so. This should now leave unallocated space behind the Win 7 partition. Now Image XP and Win 7.

Next use Partition Wizard to extend the Backup partition to reclaim the unallocated space in front of and behind it. Once finished you should have an XP partition of about 50 Gb, followed by a Win 7 partition of about 75 Gb followed by a Backup partition containing the remainder of the space. Image all 3 partitions.

I think this should work. Make sure you have identified all your Images so you can tell them apart if disaster strikes. I have used both Partition Wizard and Easues Partition Magic to move partitions back and forth and resized partitions and both worked surprising well without any loss of data.

I have Acronis True Image Home, both 2010 and 2011 versions. When I create images I Image the entire HD. Remember however, you can only restore one partition at a time, at least thats the way mine works. For example. I have a C Drive with OS and apps and a D drive for all data. When I wish to restore, Acronis will only let me restore C or D, not C and D.

sorry Ted Myers. didn't get your post until after i played. basically, i have done what you intended me to do. all is ok. can still dual boot. only thing i see now when booting into win 7 is a message which disappears very quickly. have tried to read, so if not 100% accurate, cant do anything about it as the 'Pause' button wont stop the progress of the booting. it says something like g program missing autocheck skipped. dont know to what it refers. bit weird. anyway, i may be able to put the separate images created a couple of days ago back on to the new partitions separately now. if i can, it may stop that message from briefly appearing. wont try anything further tonite and want to reimage the partitions first anyway. appreciate the help guys. many tnx

It is possible you could do a repair install from within Win 7. Pop in your installation disk and choose repair rather than install. You might have to reinstall a few updates. If you already have SP1 installed you can download the Win 7 iso file including SP1 from Digital River, right click the file and choose Burn Image to Disk, burn it to a DVD then use that for the repair install. Your original Win 7 key will work to unlock the correct version from the iso file.

tnx for the further info. got genuine win 7 ultimate, so no need to download. getting sp1 as a separate entity though. i'm just extremely curious as to exactly what is missing, especially as everything seems to be working as it should. will give it a go tomorrow. tnx again

ok . so i did a bit of internet hunting and came across info relating to the 'g program missing autocheck skipped' message i was getting. there were 2 opinions on the possible cause, both of which could apply to me. the first was that an uninstall of a Norton product, the second was a registry error had occurred. what i then did was log into the XP partition and run the Norton Removal Tool because i had used Partition Magic 8.05 for a long time, but removed it because it didn't support Win 7 before i started playing with the partitioning of the new HDD as above. that made no difference. next thing was a simple registry change. to do that i followed the instructions to go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\Session Manager

once that key is found, look for the 'BootExecute:REG_MULTI_SZ:autocheck autochk *' string in the right hand pane. mine said:

BootExecute:REG_MULTI_SZ:autocheck autochk *autocheck g

all that is required is to remove the 'autocheck g' part of the string (and anything else that may be there), leaving the string as above. voila! all done.

hope this little bit of info will be helpful to someone else.
tnx for the advice given guys. all seems to be fine atm