Yep, read it and weep.
New laptop, decided to make some room for a few Linux distros. Won't shrink below 155 Gig (basically half the disk).
It's a Dell XPS, and already has 4 partitions on it ... I can see this getting completely erased, *real* soon.

155GB? Have you turned off its virtual memory? It sometimes gets dumped somewhere in the middle of a drive and there is no way that it will move of itself.

I have seen the same problem on my laptop, so just decided to ignore Microsoft tools. Please use external tools. Boot your system using gParted and change size of the partition.

regards
Rafal

Yeah, I intend to slap it around with gparted - if I get pissed of I'll just erase it all and install things the way *I* want it.

Just wanted to let off a bit of steam ...

Just been through the resize Vista thing on a new Toshiba.
After a false start with Gparted, a non booting Vista and a restore from CD, I got rid of the the Virtual memory, defraged and resized to 15GB using Vista's Disk Management. If you use anything else you stand a pretty good chance of Vista not booting as happened to me a lot of other people it seems to have happened to!
Anyway Vista lasted about a week, needed it for a Wireless Connection while away over Christmas. Having now got a driver that works, I did a Live dvd remaster, wiped the drive and reinstalled PCLinux from the remaster and Vista has been retired.

Nah, gparted worked fine. Reduced Vista to 50 Gig, expanded the extended into the now vacant space, moved the logical. No fuss.
Vista took about 40 minutes to reboot, going through partition recovery, but everything is up and runing - Ubuntu 64 bit and Slackware included.

Hmmm . . . normally, I would not ask for "hand-holding," but could you post a step-by-step list of what you've done? I (and probably others) am interested in this.

That, plus I'm a little slow where resizing partitions are concerned and unashamed to admit it.

It's basically "follow your nose".
Use a gparted liveCD, select a partition, click "move/resize", and plug in some numbers. I prefer to do it this way rather than use the "sliders". I needed to set "space in front" to zero, and (where applicable) a new size, and eventually hit apply.

All done.

Ah, so! I have a gparted disk image, so no problem there. CDs are cheap. Now, just so I have this rooted firmly in my brain, the "space in front" reference is the space on the hard disk that is reserved for whatever reason by what? Vista or something else?

And how much minimum space does Vista require to operate again? Wasn't it 60 gig or something outrageous?

If you shrink sda1 you'll have (unallocated) space "in front" of sda2. gparted terminology, not mine - pretty obvious when you see the pictures.

I've got Vista (Home premium) in 50 Gig as I said above - it's using around 15 Gig. Ultimate initially fitted into 25 Gig on another box - until I threw some games at it, now it has all of an 80 Gig disk.