Vista - Shrink Volume for dual boot

I am setting up a dual boot Vista Ultimate is installed and I intend adding
XP Pro. I am following the instructions given at:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...ista-computer/

Unfortunately I have stumbled on the first hurdle - shrinking the Vista
Volume on C:

My C; drive has a usable size of 279gb of which 107gb is used leaving 172gb
free space.
I want to generate a drive for XP that is 60gb but shrink volume won't let
me.

Shrink Volume shows the following:

Total size before shrink in MB = 286171 [which is 279.4gb]
Size of available shrink space in MB = 44428 [which is 43.3gb)
Total after shrink in MB = 241743 [which is 236gb]

If I try to enter 61440mb in the "Enter amount of space to shrink in MB",
the "Total size after shrink" goes down to zero and is grayed out.

So why can't I shrink my drive by 60gig? I need to do a full XP Pro
installation, then install Avid Liquid (which states it needs 40gig on a
clean XP install) then all the XP service packs, Anti virus, graphics card
drivers I'm wondering if 60gig will be enough!!!

--
Ron O'Brien

When I used the Vista built-in partitioning tool after I first got my computer, I ran into similar problems. There are some important limitations to the Vista partitioning tools that you should keep in mind: you can only shrink and expand NTFS or RAW (unformatted) partitions; when you shrink, there are some unmovable files such as page files or shadow copy storage areas that inhibit the amount of shrinkage allowed; you cannot extend a partition into unallocated space to the left (lower disk addresses) of the partition to be added to; you cannot move around unallocated space; if you have too many bad clusters on the disk, then you cannot shrink a partition on it. Many of these limitations are removed by commercial products such as those from Symantec and Acronis...

Boot-It NG is a shareware partition management utility that can be used to manage the shrinking and extending of partitions better than Vista's built-in tool. It has an old DOS style interface, but it works well. You can get it here:
Boot Manager, Partition Manager, and Drive Image Utility - BootIt Next Generation
I downloaded the free trial version and burned it to a CD with the included program MakeDisk.exe in order to be able to move some unallocated space immediately behind one of my four partitions that I wanted to extend. I just booted from the CD, clicked on the menu choice for "Partition Work", and then used the "partition slide" concept to move the unallocated space. The TerabyteUnlimited site has a good deal of documentation, tutorials, answers to FAQs, videos, etc. for how to use the program:
TeraByte Unlimited :: Support :: BootIt Next Generation

On my Dell laptop with pre-installed Vista, I had good luck using
Gparted - a Linux partition manager which runs on a bare-bones
version of Linux (which disappears when you exit Gparted).
Gparted will shrink Vista's partition much further than will Vista's
Disk Management, and it's just as intuitive to use. You can
download a free .zip file to make a live USB stick (as I did) or you
can download a free .iso file to make a live CD. These free files are
are both available from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php .
Here's some user documentation:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/livecd/livecd.htm
(For the live USB, I take all the defaults at startup, except that
I choose "1" - for the "Medium" level of expertise - and then I
tell it NOT to let the startup routine select the graphic driver auto-
matically, but then I accept its selection and the rest of the defaults.)

Don't use Gparted to add or delete logical drives to/from a Vista-
created Extended partition, though. Vista uses a new 2,048-sector
offset from the beginning of its partitions, and the feature can cause
problems for other partition managers in Extended partitions.

*TimDaniels*

"Ron O'Brien" wrote:

Just in case anyone else has this problem, I discovered how to get around
it. Re-start in safe mode, then got into disk management \ shrink drive that
way

Ron

Actually stated by my instructor it is necessary to install any older versions of windows before newer versions. If you want xp pro you must save all that you need and format the disk. Then install xp pro before vista.

I installed Vista first. I then installed Windows XP. Next was DOS 6.22 and
then Windows 7.

So, you see, there are always work arounds that instructors don't know
about.


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