Vista Partition Tool

Didn't know where to post it, so desided to post in Dell forum since its a problem on a dell laptop.

ok. A friend of mine got a new Inspirion 1520, obviously with Vista installed on it, and asked me to repartiotion drive C: to make it around 40Gb out of total 136 available. So far around 11Gb is used on the partition by OS Office and some other programs.

So b4 going over her place i decided to get a partition tool for Vistaa. I am using Partition Magic for my XP needs, so it couldnt work under Vista.
I googled for good software, briefly scaned the results and found out that ppl where happy with the built in tool in Vista. So i figured i would use it too.

When I came over and started playing around with it i ran into the problem.

It wouldnt let me make the partiotion smaller than about 70Gb. Leting me shrink it only by roughly 65 Gb.

It gives a note that "Size of available shrink space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are enabled on the volume."
why the **** would it reserve 70 SEVENTY Gb? For what???

Yes the hibernation and page files are enabled and both all together use no more than 10 gb. There is another 11 Gb used for OS n stuff, That makes it 21 all together.

How do i getaround this? Tryied to find out what snapshots are and where do i contrall there size limits, but couldnt find anything.

So I ask good ppl of Notebookreview.com to help me figure out what is happening here and help me repartition the C: volume to the sie of 36-40Gb.


So far Vista pisses me off...

 

vanger - Greetings - I have had good luck using the Disk Manager in Vista to shrink partitions. Biggest thing though - is to run defrag from the command line with admin privileges: defrag c: -w -v before you attempt to shrink the volume. My new dv6500t, received yesterday, had over 1000 fragmented files with over 10,000 fragments on a brand new drive!! And, yes, the factory Vista images, at least from H-P, are really a mess. Edited to add - oops - misread that you did use Vista's Disk Manager.

 

Remove the page file from that partition and create a page file in a partition you won't touch, for now. Get rid of the hibernation files (that can be added later on after you're done doing what you need to do), then try re-partitioning the drive(s).

You should not have any more problems. After that, move the page file back, and re-create the hibernation data/sector/files/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

 

vanger - I am not quite clear on what you are trying to do. Are trying to shrink the C:\ partition to enlarge another? Or enlarge C:\ at the expense of D:\?

[Actually I want to do the latter on my M1330 and I think I read of a possible problem but I figured I could get around it by shrinking D:\ Creating a new partition E:\, Copying D: to E:, then combining D: and C: into the new C:. I am curious to know if anyone has tried that and whether it works]

But back to your problem. I think it is not the absolute size of the pagefile and any snapshots that is the problem but their location on C:\.
You may be able to temporarily move the page file to D:\ and then may find C:\ can be reduced further. If the snapshots are the problem - well I don't know what they are so cannot advise but a similar tactic might be possible.

 

Triple_Dude , thanks for advice...
i'll try to do this, but if this is a reason why i can't reduce the partition less than 70gb, than this software needs some seeeeeerious tuning.

Nalda I am trying to shrink C from 136 to 36-40Gb. And the integrated software sets the minimum limit of roughly 70Gb.