Hi, I've just bought a laptop from hp with an 80 gb hard disk and windows Vista.
I want to partition the hard drive into 2 drives... around 40 gb each, but the built-in partition program only lets me great a partition around 5gb....?!?!
I've been told that i can use a third party software to achieve the desired result, but then i need to repair vista using the setup disk...
i only have 'recovery' software from my laptop manufacturer, which essentially puts everything back to how it was when i got the pc...
please tell me what is the solution... and why does vista need ~70gb?

Hi,
The space may be being reserved. Disable Hibernation and System Restore temporarily (note that doing this causes the loss of all current restore points), then reboot and run diskmgmt.msc. You should then be able to shrink the system volume sufficiently to create the desired second one.
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP mvp.support.microsoft.com/ Windows help - rickrogers.org My thoughts rick-mvp.blogspot.com
"Sunny Jacob" <Sunny Jacob discussions.microsoft.com>

Hi Rick, thanks for the reply, however it didn't work...
I found out how to disable hibernate (command promt in admin mode: powercfg -h off)
just in case i also changed the advanced settings in my power profile aswell so that none of the options used hibernate
And I disable system restore on all drives.
then i restarted and ran the program like you said, right clicked my windows partition (70gb) and clicked on "shrink this volume", but the shrink button is grayed out and the up and down arrows in the "enter the amount of disk space you want to shrink..."
i've just read in the same dialog that the pagefile may also be taking up space, I will now disable that and restart again to see if it makes a difference. (however i think i tried that last time to no avail)
please help, many thanks!
Sunny

"Rick Rogers" wrote:

just tried without pagefile aswell and still no change...
so to recap i've currently got 1 80gb hard disk (formatted ~75gb) the drive is split into 2 partitions, 1 (vista) = 70gb, (65% empty) 2 (empty) = 5gb, (100% empty)
i've tried to shink the vista volume with pagefiles turned off, system restore off on all drives and hibernate turned off...
but vista say i cannot reduce the size lower than 70gb...?
why it need so much space?
many thanks in advance, please respond asap, best regards,
Sunny

"Sunny Jacob" wrote:

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There are at the distance 70 GB one or more files who cannot replaced. Maybe defragmenting will help.
Met vriendelijke groeten, Jawade. Bootmanager ook voor Vista Zin in een koffie- thee- of borrelpraatje? Kom naar alt.jawade.nl jawade.nl (Mirror op geocities.com/kolibrie.geo) Bootmanager, ClrMBR, DiskEditors, POP3lezer, Filebrowser, Kalender

Sunny Jacob wrote:

Vista needs about 15GB per MS's advice. I see you've already had several responses to your question, and I don't disagree with any of them.
But I use Disk Directory by Acronis to do exactly this sort of chore, so I know it will work. They will let you use DD for 30 days for free.

Thanks for the tips guys,
i did try to do the defragmentation, however the interface didn't show me what was going on... no estimate of time required or even a progress bar, it just looked like the program had crashed or something...?
maybe i'll let it run over night and see if it finishes in the morning...
the drive shouldn't be too bad, i've only had the laptop less than a month...
Re: third party partitioning software: unfortunately i've seen it written in many tutorials that that is possible, but the vista setup cd is required to repair vista before it will run again, unfortunately i wasn't given a setup disk with my purchase, on recovery cds... which i'm told just reverts everything back to hp factory settings... deleting all programs, files etc...
I can't risk trying that in case i can't get back into the computer again... if anyone from microsoft can confirm this is a safe procedure, i'll try it, but if i can't get back into the pc, i'll be stuck....
or can i get a setup cd, or somesort of boot cd with the vista repair/recovery program..?, please advise...
many thanks!!
Sunny

"Don" wrote: