Disk Partition Stuff

Hi all,
I have a year-and-a-half old laptop that came with Vista on it. Last Summer I got curious and installed Ubuntu. I put it on a 10 GB partition at the front end of my hard drive. The original Vista partition is right after it (I guess it was moved when I installed Ubuntu -- I don't remember). The Vista partition is about 110GB, and then there's about 1MB of free space floating around.

I would like to shrink my Vista partition down about 20GB, since I have 40 of it free, and extend that into my Ubuntu partition. That would involve shrinking Vista, moving Vista, and then expanding Ubuntu. The problem is, Vista's partition manager won't shrink Vista down more than 1GB. Also, Vista's partition manager doesn't like the Ubuntu partition (can't read it). Gparted can't operate on the Vista partition (it's NTSF).

Aaaanyway. How can I do what I want to do?

You could try another partition editor like Partition Magic (if it's compatible with Vista NTFS).
Another thing you could do is back up the Vista partition, delete it and create a smaller partition, then restore to the smaller partition.

Yes, I'd have to get a newer version of Partition Magic. Don't want to spend! The second option looks interesting. I would just need to be assured two things: 1. I'd be able to expand the Ubuntu partition (i.e. GRUB would still work), and 2. I'd be able to get Vista back on (i.e. the backup method would work). I don't know very much about these things.
I'll look into the backup/delete idea. Thanks.

EASEUS offers a free partition manager for download (As far as I remember, though, it only worked for 32-bit Vista)

Windows partitioning support is pathetic to say the least. And it is largely incompatible with PartitionMagic. So my advice is usually: avoid Windows partitioning tools like the plague.
Now, there are several other tools available, including some for Linux, I would believe.

And we begin our journey down the rabbit hole.

So, I ran EASUES (lovely program), and after a reboot and some scanning, it told me that I have errors on my disk. So, I ran scandisk. It runs in "DOS" after a reboot. After getting 75% through step 5 of 5, "verifying free space", it hangs. I'm aware of this problem, and so I hit Google, but all of the information I could find was ooold. So now I'm downloading "Ultimate Boot CD" which hopefully I will use to check for errors on my drive. All I need to do is fix whatever EASUES doesn't like. Still, I suspect something more sinister may be afoot.

Does anybody have further insight into this Vista-hangs-chkdsk thing?

It seems that the last chkdsk corrupted my partition. Now WIndows won't boot, and the "startup repair" stopped working months ago (just closes immediately). Time for Vista's recovery disk....

Well, for anyone who's interested, I managed to do what I set out to do.

Lessons leaned?

1. CD-bootable operating systems are very useful, easy to use and powerful.
2. Microsoft's online live chat support is terrible, time-consuming and ineffective.

Conclusion?

Make sure you're done with exams before doing trivial things like moving partitions.

That's good to know, since I'll have to wipe out my OS partition, change it to RAID 5 and restore it pretty soon. I'll burn an Ultimate Boot CD before I attempt it.

Actually, it was Vista's recovery CD that saved the system, and a LiveCD of Gparted that moved it all around. But the diagnostics on Ultimate Boot are indispensable.

I like to have two operating systems installed. Further, I like to install boot loaders on all my hard drives, in case on should fail.
Only problem is that XP is dependant on the order of the boot order in BIOS.
Well, it has worked somewhat well so far.

> Only problem is that XP is dependant on the order of the boot order in BIOS.
No it isn't, why do so many people think that?!

What I do:

1) Install Linux
2) Make a new parition for Windows
3) Install Windows to that partition (makes no difference whether it's first or not) -- just make sure when you're installing it the Windows partition has the boot flag or else the paths get messed up (ie no C:\)
4) Give my /boot partition the boot flag
5) Chainload XP

Of course step 1 & 2 are interchangable.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zacs7

> Only problem is that XP is dependant on the order of the boot order in BIOS.
No it isn't, why do so many people think that?!

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Because I witnessed it myself.
I had to go in and change boot.ini for every hard drive I booted from, to change what drive number it should boot from.
And here's the crux: that "number" was the number in the boot list.

So if the hard drive having XP was 3rd in the boot list, I had to put a 2 there (since XP counts from 0, not 1).
Otherwise it wouldn't boot.

You could always put the XP bootloader on the primary disk (maybe a small ~5mb partition at the front). Or you can chainload... using the power of grub or lilo (pfft ;))

I put the Vista bootloader (or XP) on all hard drives to minimize the risk.

I put 1/3 of the boot loader on each of my disks to maximize the risk. :p