What type of partition does Vista use ?
And QtParted, can it resize a Vista partition ?
I have been to the QtParted website and they don't say anything about
Vista, just about the NTFS , partition type.

Jim

Vista uses NTFS.

Then I should be able to resize Vista for a dual boot, using QTParted ?

Hello mickeyboa,

I don't use Vista or QtParted, but I have read reports by people who successfully used QtParted to resize Vista partitions. I have also seen reports by people who could not get it to work on Vista partitions. I saw one report by a person who ruined his Vista installation with it.

Did you know that Vista's own Disk Management utility will resize partitions? Maybe it would be safer.

Vista's Disk Management utility, Is that utility run from inside of
Vista ? Wouldn't that cause a problem of resizing while partition is mounted ?

The Windows Vista help article Can I repartition my hard disk? describes it in some detail. But the article also notes at the end that third party disk managers work on Vista partitions, too.

Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't go resizing partitions without taking backups of any valuable data first. In other words, don't resize a partition unless you can afford to lose the data it contains.

Hello rkelsen,

I would not call you paranoid for that. It's a good practice. Personally, I like the GParted LiveCD and have never had a single bad incident with it while shrinking or moving partitions. But it's also easy to find forum posts about disasters from partition manipulation. And another precaution would be to make sure that you can lay your hands on the installation disk for your OS (or a backup disk image) before resizing partitions. That bad thing has happened to people, too.

Use disk management tool from within Vista. It is painless you just shrink your NTFS partition so that you have your needed amount of "unallocated freespace" for linux.

You should defragment the NTFS partition first though. I did it on a Sony Laptop running Vista Ultimate and installed Fedora Core 6 then installed Fedora 7 when it was released. Easy and painless.

ps: as stoat mentioned "And another precaution would be to make sure that you can lay your hands on the installation disk for your OS (or a backup disk image) before resizing partitions."

.

I've read this thread and many others throughout the web, and the only solutions offered seem to be to spend dollars on partitioning software for use in Vista. I have just gotten a laptop with Vista on it, and the "shrink volume" option is useless (surprise surprise), since it won't let you take full advantage of the free space in the hard drive. Vista apparently creates partitions all over the place, with "unmovable" parts. As usual, they've made it as hard as possible for the user to use his/her hardware as he/she well damn pleases, so that one has to give money to some other company making the partitioning software that's "just for you". Has somebody found a solution to properly (and efficiently) reduce the size of the partition with Vista on it, without bending over?

It was done on my Sony which had a backup/restore partition besides the partition that Vista is installed to. I could very well imagine that some "computer manufacturers" would make it difficult but maybe not intentional but because of a backup/restore strategy. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here. I absolutely had no problem doing mine and it was all done from within Vista.

Ryptyde, what partitioning manager did you use??

While in Vista go to "Control Panel>Administration Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management. Then right click on the NTFS partition and choose one of the options from the context menu eg: shrink.

I will try and find the link to a site where there is a better description and screen images of the procedure.

Edit: Finally found the link sorry for the delay: Vista Disk Management

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Thank you all for your responses, and sorry for the delay reporting back: I was quite buried in this mess the last couple of days. The solution (found almost by pure luck) was to use Toshiba's (my laptop's manufacturer) recovery disks, which mercifully included an option to recover Vista into a custom size partition. As I said, Vista's "shrink volume" option in the control panel is nearly worthless because you can only reduce the size of the partition by a tiny amount (Vista is greedy and likes to hug almost double the amount installed in the hard drive to run). I wish I didn't even have to install such a treacherous OS, but need it to run software controlling some particular instruments. Anyway, using the recovery disks worked. The only problem remaining now is to choose an appropriate keyboard layout in KDE. This is a Toshiba P200 Satellite T5300 Core 2 duo laptop:

http://www.toshiba.ca/web/product.gr...t=6480#spectop

Any tips on this welcome!