Problems with Vista partition resize

Recently I bought Asus F3Jp laptop. It came with Vista preinstalled. Since I want to install Linux also, today I tried resizing Vista partition. My laptop came with 3 partitions. First - 4GB Asus recovery partition(primary), second - 87 GB NTFS partition where Vista was installed, also primary, and third - extended partition with NTFS partition taking all the space. Vista has in its disposal tool for reducing partitions without loosing data and so on. I tried to use it and it let me resize the 87 GB partition to 60 GB. But no further. Then I tried to clean up the partition, I cleaned up from 20GB to 15GB, tried resizing again, no luck. I defragmented filesystem (which is a stupid thing for NTFS partitions), Vista showed that I can resize 200MB more. I tried disabling hibernating, and disabling pagesys file, no luck. Any ideas why is this stupid limit of 60GB? Vista needs 45 GB of free hard drive space to function properly? I would like to give Vista 30 GB no more. Without knowing why Vista does not let me resize the partition I am a bit reluctant to use other resizing tools, because in my experience Windows never liked to be touched by somebody else Any suggestions would be very welcomed.

 

a very good guide (explanation) to shrink & expand partitions under vista:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial133.html

cheers ...

 

Yeah the guide is good. It actually did not tell anything new, I was using these tools already. Now I can also say that Vista does not shrink my partitionbelow 60GB using both gui and comand line tools The guide speaks about page file and shadow copy storage area, but surely they cannot take up 45GB of space? This is the number Vista says is freely available.

 

Also I tried setting shadow copy storage size to 8GB, did not help.

 

I always use Gparted live cd to resize.

I resized Vista once using Gparted form 50GB to 30GB. Took about a hour or two but all went well.

 

the guide mentions that if vista hits the file "location" it will not move beyond that. Meaning (imo) it has nothing to do with the size

i would try, after deleting the storage/pagefile, perform first a defrag and then the resizing

if u use gPart, u would notice that before the repartitioning, it performs a file management (moving about)


cheers ...

 

Hm, I will try again disable the page file. I already did the defragmentation. I found how to disable repair points, so Vista let me resize the partition by further 12GB, but it gave an error by doing that. The error was from atapi, so I ran complete checkdisk. It took about 20 minutes, and did not find anything bad. Yet the same problem persists. So maybe my harddrive is giving problems?

 

have u tried defragging the drive in safemode with little load as much as possible? it is not so much as defrag but what the drive really needs is the whole re.arrangement of FAT and so on. Boy, do i miss the old norton dos disk defragger

ur other choice is to try out gPart liveCD (it is also free)

cheers ...

 

I also just recently purchased an F3JP - it had the same 3 partitions.

There shouldn't be a limit to the minimum size Vista puts on a partition. As soon as my laptop booted up, I removed the third partition (the one without the OS), shrunk the OS partition down to minimum size (20 gigs or so)... then resized it back up to 106 gigs to fit the rest of the drive.

I'm not sure how much that really helps you - but I wanted you to know it is possible. Maybe it's because I did it before I started installing / uninstalling programs?

 

Probably. But I did not know Vista enough to do it in a first place. When installing programs I did have one nasty Vista breakdown, probably it caused problems. It seems that I will be forced to use this hidden partition to recover Vista. It uses 4GB of my harddrive, so it will have a chance to prove that it uses this space for a reason

 

Haha, good luck! I almost deleted that 4gb partition without realizing what it was when I first got the machine.

Let it prove itself worthy

 

I have 2 partitions, one where the Vista OS resiedes (43 GB), and the other partition for my documents 50 GB. In windows XP you had the chance to move your documents folder to another partitions by right clicking the "my documents" icon in the desktop and choosing properties, then you would browse to the new partition, so that the "my docments" folder resides on the partition you want. Anybody know how to do this in vista?

 

vista start button -> documents (right click) -> properties -> location

cheers ...

 

thanks, should have figured it out. LOL

 

Ok, I recovered Vista, and was able to resize the partition to 30GB. Just like the old days. Use Windows for a period of time, then reinstall to make it work properly again