Vista - Help! HDD Partitioning Inside Vista x64

My issue is that I cannot make a large enough partition from inside Vista x64.

I have two 1TB HDDs in mirroring, and there's only 1 primary partition right now that spans across the entire 1TB. 350GB of the 1TB are occupied by the OS and documents / files.

My objective is to split this 1TB into two partitions for dual boot with Win7 RC. And for that I need a 2nd primary partition on this drive (at least 20GB or so).

I first tried the standard way of creating a new partition. From Disk Management, I right clicked on the C drive and Shrink Volume. Then, it says I can only shrink by 1GB!!! Since I cannot be repeating that 20 or more times, I unsuccessfully gave diskpart.exe a shot.

Can anybody help me with this?

On the Shrink C disk from Disk Management, it sasy:

Size of available shrink space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are enabled on the volume.

Could this be the reason? And if so, how can I turn them off?

Thank you!

Go to Computer | Properties | Advanced System Settings | System
rotection - turn off System Restore. Then reboot. Now run a manual defrag
on the drive you want to shrink. Then try the shrink process again.

If still no joy you will need to perform a boot time defrag that is offered
by some 3rd party defrag programs, such as PerfectDisk or DisKeeper.

I do all of my partition work by booting from a CD that contains Acronis
Disk Director Suite. By doing this I am not encumbered by any locked
files/folders because none are in use (the operating system is non in use at
that point).

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"NYCGirl" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:d658d983c048a9427b9dff7e18112d1c@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Thank you for your reply. I suspect that I may well have to do the special defrag. I turned off System Restore, Pagefile etc. but I cannot still shrink enough.

I read about Acronis Disk Director Suite, however, I hardly have to make partitions, so, it's probably not smart for me to invest 50 dollars on the soft..

I will try PerfectDisk or DisKeeper to move the MBR etc. Thank you for the suggestions!

NYCGirl <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote:
Try the freebie EASEUS:

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

"NYCGirl" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:7bac61819b2f62cd7e6f6595a8b6db57@xxxxxx-gateway.com...Go here...
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Download the iso. Copy the image (iso) to cd. Boot from it. You are good
to go.
--

"Slap" <slap@xxxxxx> wrote:
No... don't "copy" it. Burn it with software that can handle an ISO
image and break it down into its components so that the result will be
a bootable install disc.

Hi!!! Thank you very much!! I ended up booting and making partitions from Vista disk over hte weekend as nothing else worked..

I did Perfect Disk's SMARTPlacement to move Boot files, but it was still not shrinkable. I had the option to defrag at boot, but when I set it to that option and rebooted, I got a message that the defrag could not be performed, I also got some letters like /f /d c:\ or whatever (I don't remember exactly what it was) which made no sense to me. So, I figure, if the software that people pay for couldn't do it, then there was no hope. And decided to reinstall Vista and make partitions.

Thank you for all of your help! I learned a lot!!!

"Ray Luca" <rayluca@xxxxxx> wrote in message
newsl7f05te854a25equu72nnf9plveobv8i5@xxxxxxThat's what Vista does. They call it 'copy image to cd' from the right
mouse button drop down menu. If she has XP she needs a third party iso
maker. In vista 'copy' to CD will do just that and she will end up with a
'iso' file which of course will not boot.

--

yeah I know what you are saying, I have Roxio Creator 2009, and I have to choose Make a disk from an image or something like that. That's how I made my Win 7 installation disks and other bootable disks. You don't make a copy of an ISO image and put it on a disk as it is.

Hey I bookedmarked EASEUS Partition Master (the free version supposedly only works on 32-bit Vista and mine's 64 bit) but downloaded Gparted's latest version.

As far as I can tell, it's NOT an ISO file. I could use WinRAR which unpacks compressed files including zip files. So I just seed it on my C drive, and I can run it like that?

Though I already made necessary partitions, I would like to learn how to use it so that I can use it when I change my mind again and change the current partitions, lol.