Dual booting Vista and Windows 7, how big of a partition should I make?

new problem...

when i try to shrink my main partition it only lets me shrink it by 70MB...... i have ~120 free! what gives?

 

well, how much will you need? me personally, i only want to get a feel for the OS, maybe try a game or two, so i gave it 25Gb. if you plan on basically transitioning to Win7 already, i guess you should make it big enough to hold all your data.

 

yeah ideally id like to fit all my data on both, but thats clearly not possible.


i know filling up your harddrive to capacity really slows down its performance, I'd like to know if that applies only to the physical disc or to partitions as well. For example, if i have 180 GB of data and make my vista partition only 185GB will that effect performance even though the harddrive itself is 300?

in windows 7 will i no longer have access to any of my data on the vista partition?

 

You already answered your question. Partitions do not change the disk, do they? It is simply a different layout. The Vista partition will need minimum 11% of free space in order to be able to flush RAM and defrag. It is your choice but a full HDD with 20 partitions will be as bad as a full HDD with 1 partition.

 

In the future, you might want to consider keeping a partition dedicated for personal data; that way reinstalling/formating your PC is greatly simplified.

 

new problem...

when i try to shrink my main partition it only lets me shrink it by 70MB...... i have ~120 free! what gives?

EDIT: ok after a defrag it now lets me shrink by 3.3GB... still nowhere what i need

 

You have Vista files in hidden areas that is why. Prolly backups. Shadows...

 

i actually just deleted all but the most recent restore point a few hours ago.

it says the shrink size may be limited if snapshots or pagefiles are on this volume... what can i do about that?

 

I had to reinstall Vista so I could partition my HD the way I wanted it. 3 partitions.

 

Full reinstall with proper partitioning and Dual Boot with W7.

 

im not going to full reinstall. there has to be a solution that wont take hours

 

Yeah, find a partition manager that won't crash your Vista. I know Partition Magic is not compatible. Acronis has issues sometimes.

 

Believe me a full reinstall is the quickest way to go.

 

synching my itunes alone takes overnight, i'll try to find help with this someplace else if all you can think to do is reformat. thanks though

 

You'll either have to find a good program that can move files to the beginning of your hard drive, or clear up more free space and keep defragging. Move your data to DVD/external HDD, uninstall programs, etc. Then defrag again. You'll be able to shrink the partition by more - whether it will be enough, I don't know. Also disable the paging file and hibernation file - those are "unmovable", so if even a small section of one of those is near the end of the hard drive you won't be able to shrink any further than where that is.

If you were running XP, you'd see in the Defragmentation Manager that you still have files near the end of your hard drive. Vista removed this feature (beats me as to why), so that's why it doesn't make sense that you have 120 GB free but can only shrink by 3 GB. The other problem of course is that Windows' defragmentor mostly just defragments, and doesn't do a very good job of moving stuff to the beginning of the drive.

If you don't have enough external storage, you can try compressing files with the likes of ZIP files or 7z files.

I did this myself when trying to add a Linux dual-boot, and it eventually worked. But when I was putting on Win7 I completely re-formatted, and it really was easier.

 

Yeh you can spend time looking for a program that'll do what you want or you can reformat. It's really what you want to spend time doing.

All the time I could have spent searching for a program or moving data to my External HD and defraggin was better spent just reformatting from the beginning. I didn't have the time to spend searching for a program, but if you do then take the time to find one that'll do what you need to do.

 

If you are not using 64-bit Vista, try Easus Partition Manager to make the partitions.