'D' partition has 10GB's, need to take 5.....

When I got my m1330 recently, I wanted to take 5GB from the 'D' partition (recovery) and add it to the 'C' Drive, but the furthest I've gotten to was just taking the 5GB. Unfortunately, I cant seem to get the 5GB to go with the 'C' Drive. I tried doing some research and read somewhere that all that can help me now is some third party software. Are there any other alternatives to accomplishing my task, other than resorting to paid software?

 

Free partitioning tool?
http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/

 

Is it compatible with Vista?

 

It's a LiveCD; you download/burn and then run from it

 

Boot the laptop from the cd? Set in bios?

 

Yes, the BIOS may have to be configured to boot CDs (by looking at the priority order)
After, you insert the CD and it will boot

 

No, the question is about gparted. And the answer is "No". gparted is not compatible with Vista partitions.

 

What filesystem do you have on your Vista partitions?

 

NTFS, as does virtually everyone else who has Vista.

 

NTFS is fully supported by GParted so where is the problem?

 

Maybe they're old problems, but plenty of people report unbootable systems when using gparted, and need to at least do some sort of vista recovery to get the system working:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-gparted-to-resize-your-windows-vista-partition/
http://opensource.apress.com/article/163/taking-a-look-at-vista-part-iii

Clearly just because gparted supports NTFS doesn't mean it just works on Vista.

If one follows that howto on the first link, it will walk you through how to fix it, but I would not tell people to use gparted without some sort of additional information about the possible problems.

 

thanks for alerting orev..i was about to try gparted on vista..
so theres no alternative other than vista inbuilt shrink feature?

 

I wasn't aware of such problems but it seems related to Vista and not GParted.

Anyway, it always depends of specific configurations

 

If I accidentally drop some dynamite onto the ground and it explodes, would you say it's the fault of the ground that it did? I use Linux every day, but saying that this is related to Vista and not gparted is quite silly. Linux/GNU is great, but don't look at some of the tools' shortcomings with blinders on. gparted is a good tool, and simply just has not been fully updated to work with Vista partitions. There's nothing wrong with that, but just be aware of it.

nocturnal310:
If you follow the howto guide, it will walk you through doing it and then the repair you'll need to do. It's not difficult, but it might be more than you are comfortable with.

 

I said "seems"...and I don't know about this specific problem so I can't judge if it's or not.

The only thing that is hard to understand is that it's able to deal with NTFS partitions and XP with no problems at all. Vista uses NTFS and it doesn't work so at first it's normal to think that it could be related to the way the OS boots and/or to specific partitions setup (e.g. it's not the same thing resizing a data partition at the end of the disk vs the first partition that contains all system/boot files)

A partitioning tool usually deals with a filesystem (and data on it), not with the OS itself. At least, that's what I think.

Anyway, I never said Linux is superior or anything like that and I never said that you were wrong (if there is a problem with gparted + vista, OP shouldn't use it). I will stop posting in this thread because the primary goal is to help users, not winning a debate.

And we don't give legal opinions here, just opinions. Don't take this too seriously.

 

Thanks John B. So I have to download & burn the latest gparted-livecd-0.3.4-10.iso( http://download.tuxfamily.org/gpartedlive/) into cd and boot from it?