How to partition hard drive .....

I want to dual boot with fedora...but the first thing is i want to have multiple drives in windows vista but vista disk management tool says i cannot shrink beyond 40gb on my c: drive though free sapce available is 100gb and moreover it doesnt allow me to create any sort of partiotion out of the meagre unallocated space created...shoul i be doing reinstallation of everything>????

 

If Vista doesn’t allow you to change partitions then you can do it while installing Linux. Or you can use a 3rd party tool like Partition Magic.

 

If you have mediadirect, you have another problem:the last partition is mediadirect, so, you cannot steal space from the big Vista partition until you remove it.
I'd say you'd be better off with an almost complete wiping of your hd. Backup everything you created and make sure you have the OS, drivers and mediadirect HD, before doing that.
I would delete OS, recovery and mediadirect partitions, leaving the first one that I think has Dell diagnostic on it (someone please let me know if0011111111111111111111111111 <-- my cat just stepped over the keyboard
as I was saying let me know if I'm mistaken). then create a primary partition for Vista, another for linux and an exteded partition into which create as many logical partition you want.

EDIT: I forgot to add, in this way you are gonna lose mediadirect. there are ways to keep it, do a search in this forums.