Vista not allowing me to shrink partition

[Saaz]

Hello friends,

I am hardly trying to shrink my main vista partition by 10 gigs in order to get a dual boot going with fedora linux.i have over 20 gigs of free space left and when i try to shrink it by 10 gigs it says i do not have enough space on the disk(s) to complete this operation.why does it happens any thoughts??


thanks in advance.!!

[Lillebror]

Have you tried to shrink the partition in cmd?Did you defrag the drive before shrinking? There may be system files that are fixed in place on the disk - if they can't be moved, then that will limit the available shrink space.

[MrChris-]

Can you put off the Volume Shadow Copy and Hibernate your computer,turn off the System Restore also. The built-in defrag cannot move MFT type data. I would download the trial version of Perfect Disk 8.0. Do both a Offline and GUI based defrag. Then retry Diskmgmt.Msc to shrink the volume. This type of operation is always risky, so I'd take a Image of the volume in it's current state.Else you do this way format partition then delete partition (should come up with unallocated space) now extend the other partition

[Devasis]

How big-or how small- you try to make the partition with Vista? There are limits according to what version of Vista you have. I suggest you check out the minimum h/w requirements.Else you better use a third part utility to shrink the volume which is Partition Wizard Home Edition it is a free partition manager designed by MT Solution Ltd. It supports 32/64 bit Windows Operating System including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Home users can perform complicated partition operations by using this powerful but free partition manager to manage their hard disk partition such as Resizing partitions, Copying partitions, Create partition, Delete partition,Format partition, Convert partition, Explore partition, Hide partition,Change drive letter, Set active partition and Partition Recovery.