Does Gparted live do a good job resizing
Vista ?

Whatever Gparted can do the resizer inside Vista is many times better.

It is inside disk management!

Vista now keeps a copy of the partition table and can refuse to boot if it has been changed without its knowledge. So use Vista's own resizer.

Do NOT use Gparted, QTparted, Partition Magic or any other 3rd party software program to resize your Windows partition if you are using Vista. If you do then there is a high probability that Vista will no longer recognize your Windows parttion...this means you will lose everything. How do I know this? I did it....twice. The first time I used QTparted and could not recover and then I tried Partition Magic and had to reload again.

Vista can resize and format the partitions itself and it works great. What Vista can't do is add/delete partitions and this is what you use Gparted for. Linux has no problem using the partitions created by Gparted unlike Vista.
Shrink your Windows Vista by using the Vista tools and then divide up the new found space with your normal partition software.

I make these mistakes so others don't have to ..... (Norton Ghost 12.0 makes recovering my box a snap).

That reminds me of a signature that I just read.....
"I am root. If you see me laughing you better have a backup."

Now that's both funny and true!

Take care,

Jason

Hello mickeyboa,

They're right and here's why...

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/partitions.html

But someday the thirdparties will catch up to Vista and probably work with it. But for now use Vista's built-in partition manager.

Another problem is the defragmenter in Vista has changed. Unlike the one in XP, based on Executive Software's excellent program Diskeeper, Vista's gives you no visual cues if there's data left at the end of the partition. Even with XP you'd frequently have to defrag three or four times before you could successfully shrink a partition with qt/gparted. Now you'll have to work completely blind.

So ditto what everyone else said.

Stoat,
Great link. Thanks.

I have resized my Vista partition multiple times with Gparted, and yes, Vista will not boot. However, I just boot from my Vista installation cd and choose "repair previous installation" (or something to that effect) and that fixes the problem.

If one is prepared to run "repair" every time after using Gaparted then there may be a satisfactory solution. However the partition may be needed to be created first in the conventional way and not by Vista's new way. Also it may be inconvenient is one is booting Vista by another boot loader.

At the end of the day I really do not see any benefit to not to use Vista's owner resizer. It is much faster than Gparted and the end result is guaranteed.