Vista partitioning limitation.

Hey
Im using Windows Vista x86 on my Asus A8Js. I want to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu.
My Laptop has a 120 GB hard disk with only one partition. 30GB is free in that partition. I wish to allot 20GB for Ubuntu.
I tried the shrink volume thing in Vista's Disk Management but it was only able to shrink it by 280MB.

What do I do?
I basically want to creat a separate 20GB or 15GB partition so I can install Ubuntu in that.

Help!!!!!

 

I've never used Vista Disk Management but maybe you need to do some other operation to allow that tool to shrink your partition as you need. Optimize, defragment or something??? As I said, I've never used that tool so I'm just guessing.

I've always used parted in Linux for that task so can't help much more than this.

 

Defragment, run scandisk and if that still doesn't work, run a live CD and resize it with Gparted.

 

Also consider if you want to have a shared partition where you can get read/write access from either OS. Vista won't know what to do with a ext3 partition and Linux will be able to see the NTFS partition but I don't think it can write to it.

 

how do i run Gparted?

 

If you boot into say... Knoppix, a parted gui will be available somewhere in the program menu (I think it's under System.). It's a graphical interface, so it's fairly easy to get around.
In regards to Methuselah's post, it's not a bad idea to have a shared drive. Writing to NTFS drives is not a problem in Linux, I have this set up on my boxes using Fuse and ntfs-3g.

 

ok i tried gparted but its not helping...
i want to allocate 15GB from my C: (NTFS)
Since its NTFS, i think thats why

can i still install Ubuntu without removing Vista?

 

I think Wubi would be something good for you to look into. It's very easy and doesn't require you to have a lot of knowledge, and is easy to remove if you decide you don't want to use Ubuntu any more.

 

hmmmm sounds interesting let me give it a try