Can't shrink HD to form a new partition for multibooting

As title says, I can't shrink my 120 gig HD with over 40 gigs of free space to give me more than a 1.5gig partition in windows vista. I want to dual-boot XP and Vista because vista has blue screened constantly in the past 5 hours and I've had enough. I made the mistake of installing SP1 which seems to have screwed me over...

Anyways, if someone can give me any tips/reasons as to why I can't shrink my HD to allow for a partition of more than 1.5 gigs that'd be useful. Or at least point me to the thread that helps solve blue-screens because this is getting ridiculous and I need my laptop for my radio show tomorrow night but I can't do it if this thing keeps screwing up.

 

Either the page file or the hibernation file is at the end of the partition, and windows will not move it. try restarting, then shrinking. if that doesn't work, download the gparted live iso.

 

I deleted the hibernation file and disabled the ability to hibernate. How can I take care of the page file as to not interfere with the shrinking?

 

control panel, system and manteince, system, advances settings, preformace, virtual memory.

 

I tried that, and even deleted the old file, still didn't work. Also that gpartition program seems rather dangerous to use considering windows can't seem to make more than 1.5 gigs of space for a partition. How does it work exactly?

 

Gparted is a linux program that does not boot windows, so there is nothing to stop it from shrinking the drive. And You ALWAYS back up data before partitioning, even with the windows utility.

 

I suggest Boot It Next Generation for partition work on NTFS drives. Linux utils sometimes are more issuey with NTFS drives.

Look around, I posted instructions for BootItNG yesterday I think.

 

I tried to shrink my 160gb drive in my SZ and could only manage 80gb with Vista's built in tool. However with Acronis Disk Director I could shrink it all the way to 20GB leaving me 140gb to play with. So if you can I suggest you try to use Acronis.

 

Partition magic 8.0 in HIRENBOOT CD9.1 u can search this useful boot cd disc online. it's about 70MB will all the tools u need to test and repair as well as removing admin password from windows

All this done in dos so windows can't limit u to anything but u must already have 2 partition already created in order to use the REsize fuction of Pmagic.