In the Techspot post detailing how to instal Win7 RC in 3 easy steps, http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windo...asy-steps.html, the partition manager "GPparted" was suggested as a way to divide a partition where XP was installed, as XP OS doesn't have a partition manager that can do this function.

In my own case I had 3 partitions on my PC and had already used Vista partition manager to create a 4th partition for Win7. However, I'd been looking for a good freeware partiton manager for a quite awhile, and downloaded GPparted from the link shown in the post:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gpa...4&big_mirror=0

I then burnt the ISO file for GPparted as a bootable CD and ran it on bootup as a trial to create a 5th partition as if i was creating a new partiton on which to load Win7.

It created a new, primary, (unactive), parition OK, but when I re-booted none of my operating systems would boot except Vista. After a lot of failed attempts to rectify the problem, I tried to:

• Use the Vista boot manager to delete the other OS paritions but it was not able to do this,

• Re-load Acronis images of the inaccesible OSs but it could not load due to "partition error" message.

In the end, the only solution was to delete all partitions, including my 5th data storage partiton, (using XP CD parition manager on re-boot), before I could re-instal the Acronis images of the 3 OSs. The data on the storage partiton had to be restored from data backed up on external media.

I followed the instructions carefully when using GPparted, so I don't think I made any errors in using it. Perhaps my hardware or BIOS settings created a conflict? I'm using an Intel DG33FB mobo and Intel E8400 Core 2 duo 3GHZ CPU. My BIOS is set to:

Drive configuration: <Native>
Configure SATA as: <IDE>

I would appreciate any feed-back from other users of this partiton manager.