shrinking partitions

I have two partitions on my HDD, the first being the OS partition and the second Data one. I am trying to reduce the size of the second partition by 10GB so I could add it to the OS. However, when I shrink the drive, Vista (Ultimate x64) always puts it at the end of the drive! I want it at the beginning so I could merge it with the OS partition. I remember being able to do this in XP Pro, but can't find the option in Vista. Any idea how I can do this? Thanks in advance

 

Use Acronis Disk Director, that app's pretty good at slicing, dicing, and recombining partitions.

 

Acronis Disk Director is just a frontend that uses that same things as Windows does. Besides, I tried installing it and was told it was incompatible with my version of windows (don't know if it's the vista part of x64 part or both that it's incompatible with). I am thinking about using GParted, but having to fix windows after using it is just too much trouble for me.

 

I don't believe that to be true. But i could be wrong.

I work with Acronis Disk Director in XP and in my experience it's the best.

 

I don't think you can shrink by moving the beginning of a volume in Vista Partition Manager. If you have an external drive, or some free space on another partition, you can copy your data off of the data partition, remove it, extend your main partition, and then recreate the data partition. (I'm not even sure you can extend your main partition while it's running from that partition, but you could boot from a Vista disc and run diskpart to do that step.)

Or there's GParted. When I used GParted, I didn't have to fix anything, but Vista did automatically install some other driver (Generic SATA driver I think) when I rebooted. I don't know whether the driver change affected anything (like performance) or not. But it worked fine and there was nothing I had to do.

 

According to the website, Acronis DD is compatible with _Vista, although it didn't differentiate between 32 and 64 bit versions. You might double-check to see if you weren't trying to install an older version of it.

As far as just being a Win GUI, I don't think so, but I'd be happy to consider your sources if you link them or cite them. Why do I think not? Because, with respect to overall disk size limitations, the documentation states that, when running under Win, DD is limited to the size limits under Win, but when running from it's own bootable media (which you can create with the app itself), you can work with any size disk without limitations - that tells me that DD isn't just a pretty face leveraging off of the Win internals.

Finally, with DD you can specify whether de-allocated space is to be put at the front or the back of the existing partition, as indicated in this screen clip from the Acronis DD User Manual: