Installing Windows 7 on another partition? -

I was trying to install the Windows 7 beta onto my brother s laptop, however while trying to create another partition I was greeted with a message explaining that a hard drive can only have 4 partitions. Right now the partitions are: Dell Utility(~50MB), Backup (~18GB), Dell Restore(~4GB), and the Main Partition where everything is stored. As far as I can tell, it isn t really very safe to delete any of these partitions, so is there any way I could install Windows 7?

I ve never heard of a 4 partition limit... Anyways, that dell utility 50mb partition looks pretty useless. But if you don t want to get rid of that see if the disk management utility from within windows lets you create a new partition. Also, remember to defragment before creating a new partition. Or else it might spit out some errors or fail while creating one. I have a quad-boot setup on my desktop right now between vista/xp/win7/ubuntu. Althought it s split over 2 hard drives, not 4 on 1.

Read The definitive dual-booting guide: Windows 7, Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step for possible solutions. http://apcmag.com/the_definitive_dualboo... QD1956

I wouldn t delete them, but you can use another partition tool to create more, that is just a restriction in vista