?? Vista + Partitions Read Here ??

[Thev00d00]

in boot options just put nothing but bootloader +1 thats what i did lol

[chickpea]

Another irritating thing about Vista is that it's internal partitioning tool (that you should use to shrink the vista partition) will NOT allow you to shrink the NTFS partition beyon something like 90Gbs!!!! Even though Vista will only fill up about a third of that at most.

I found an excellent post about this on VistaRewired

http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/16/how- ... mment-5369
and

http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/16/how- ... ment-10749

which will allow you to resize the vista ntfs partition down to a reasonable size.

The steps are:

disable system restore (this can such up to 15% of the partition size!)
use perfectdisk trialware to resize/defrag vista ntfs partition
Some posts list success in repartitioning using Gparted, but I would be EXTREMELY careful about doing so as many people have hosed vista with Gparted.

Cheers

Bryan

[Mring]

I had problems resizing Vista too, thought I'd post my experience.

I first tried to shrink the partition before doing anything else, and Vista offered up 2gb from a 300gb drive.

Then I DL'd and ran a custom defrag app, which moved all moveable files to the start of the partition. Vista then offered up 4gb more, but despite disabling everything people have recommended Vista had still stuck "unmovable" files near the end of the partition. Bad luck or conspiracy? Who knows.

They really, really didn't want to be moved, whatever these files were. I downloaded Acronis Disk Manager (though non-illegal/free alternatives could work), booted to a bootable iso it made, and forced a shrink on it.

After a day or so inside Sabayon, decided to check on how Vista survived. It acted like it had never met it's own hard-drive before and reinstalled SATA drivers, but after a reboot it was happy in its ignorance of sharing an HD with Linux.

I assume that, since there was in fact unmovable data at the end of the partition, either data loss has occurred and I haven't discovered it yet or that the partitioning tool moved the files up in the partition. Either way, Vista was bootable and seemed fully functional; therefore, problems, if any, can be solved.

YMMV. Vista is clearly less inclined than XP to yield hard disk space, but seems to give it up if forced. The built in tool, though, is about useless unless it wants to play ball.

[totedati]

but despite disabling everything people have recommended Vista had still stuck "unmovable" files near the end of the partition. Bad luck or conspiracy? Who knows.

maybe this unmovable files was the windows variant of swap partition or file. You know, even windows have one not so? From my distant recall of how winxp has working, i remember that this swap file always is growing from the end of you c: partition to the beginning of it. If you disable it, i do not know how is done now in vista, a I DON"T WANT TO KNOW, only when real life will force me to do so, can be a little hope to shrink more you partition ...

YMMV. Vista is clearly less inclined than XP to yield hard disk space, but seems to give it up if forced. The built in tool, though, is about useless unless it wants to play ball.

and for any man and women with brains here is only a trace of another gate, between you and you dreams, and a gatekeepers, ready to cash in your dreams ... you see it not so?

[Mring]

I'd disabled the swap file, so it wasn't that. Uninstalled anti-virus too thinking it perhaps was that -- wasn't that either.

My personal theory is that it was a giant blank hidden file named The Great Wall of Vista, created for the express purpose of keeping Linux off a Vista hard-drive.

Also had off system recover and all that junk too. My recommendation to anyone in the future trying to resize Vista is just to use a third-party tool.

[gazal]

I've found this. Maybe is useful, probably it is.

VistaBootPRO 3.3, which has now been downloaded over 600,000 times across the web, was developed to make changes to the Windows Vista Boot Configuration Data (BCD) registry quickly and easily, doing the job in a fraction of the time it would take using the alternative. VistaBootPRO allows users to easily and neatly organize their boot configuration entries from within all flavors of Windows.



Chances are you're here because you're running Windows Vista and want to do one of two things. Install a second OS or manage your boot configuration without directly editing the BCDEdit file. As you likely now realize, Windows Vista has made this task somewhat complicated for most users. VistaBootPRO was developed to make changes to the Windows Vista Boot Configuration Data (BCD) registry quickly and easily, doing the job in a fraction of the time it would take using the alternative. The only other way to edit the BCD is to use the command prompt application "bcdedit.exe," located in the Windows\system32 folder of Windows Vista, which requires users to become familiar with the ins and outs of the bcdedit.exe switches and options, leaving many frustrated users in its path. VistaBootPRO allows users to easily and neatly organize their boot configuration entries from within all flavors of Windows.



http://www.vistabootpro.org/

[mdlinuxwolf]

To shrink a Vista partition, right click on Computer. Select manage. Then disc management. Right click on the volume where you want to put Sabayon. Then select shrink and free up the space that you need.

For a desktop, I would recommend getting a 2nd hard drive. For a laptop, this isn't possible. I was only able to get about 12 GB free on my laptop to install Sabayon. It works. I'll just need to store stuff on an external drive, which I have.

Swap files are for people who don't have enough RAM. I've never seen any sort of Linux that needed a swap file so long as it had 512 MB or more RAM. Just run 1 GB of RAM, which is what Vista has to have anyway and don't use a swap file. If your computer is ever stolen, crooks can decrypt your swap file and steal practically anything that you were doing recently. The nice thing about RAM is that when the power goes off, the data is lost.

I successfully dual boot Vista Business with Sabayon. Recently, I was using SuSE. SuSE has trouble with sound on certain laptops. The live CD also can't get sound out of this laptop. The live DVD produced sound as does the installed version.

[totedati]

try to edit a monster 4000x4000 jpeg file in gimp and you see how useful is this swap space! even if comp will crawl a little will survive to ram test torture ...

or run you comp more that a week nonstop and you see how swap begin to be useful finally. and in this time keep open a openoffice session, 100 webpage firefox tabs, a kmail, a gaim, some little logic games, any go game fan here?, a ksnapshot, a konsole open with n tabs also, kate ofcourse, etc. etc. etc ... you know, closind and opening all the times an application when you need it & don't need it anymore, is a distant windows crap behavior ... in linux world you keep all applications open, for weeks!! months!!! you need it? you open it! use & forgot about it! but you not close the apps when you not need it for a moment ... maybe is a need for it after a day or weeks ... when you need it again is already here!

;-p

[odysseynet]

Why the heck would you use vista it sucks big time. Get rid of it if you want to use windows use windows XP pro but dont use vista its a big microsoft rip off.
Like all microsoft products

[rei4dan]

Hi!

To resize system disk on Vista, in short:
0) Back up your data!
1) run chkdsk /F
2) defragment drive (couple of times, favorably with some 3rd party tool)
3) boot-time defragmentation (to move MFT and other system files away from the end of partition with 3rd party tool)
4) resize partition using Vista's graphical (or command line) partitioning tool
[5) move other partitions (if any) close to system partition (delete and create again or use 3rd party tool)]

Longer:
I want to share my recent experience with Visa's partitioning tool. I just got my first laptop (ASUS Z53Sseries, C2D T7300, HDD 200GB, RAM 2GB, nv GeForce 8400m G 128MB) and it came with Vista Business preinstalled (no other options.. I was in better thoughts about ASUS actually ). Since I wanted to keep this windows too so I have available one (though very buggy) if the need arises (and I'm not comfortable throwing away what I have paid for), then I decided to make it dual boot with Linux. Vista Business downgrade looks troublesome, since couldn't find legal (still something unclear in this context) XP installation disk to use.

Soon I discovered that Vista comes with partitioning tool, so I used it. Visual interface for that tool has it's limitations (e.g. can't manage extended partition), but from command line works nice. Then I discovered that I can resize D: disk without problems, but disk C: would not resize at all (max shrink size=0). Googled for this and learned, that many have problems with the same thing. There were offered three options:
1) use Vista's graphical partitioning tool,
2) use Vista's command line tool,
3) use GParted (DANGEROUS! Compatible with Vista only for month or so and not on LiveCD! Besides LiveCD and LiveUSB failed to boot properly for me).

Soon I learned that graphical tool works just as well as command line tool (within its limitations stated above), that is they dosen't shrink my C: disk Further web search gave me idea that I should defragment my HD. Did that with Vistas defragmenter couple of times with no success. Then I stumbled upon this post:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... -problems/

That was the answer I was looking for! But system file deletion and pagefile and SSV disabling was unnecessary, though you can gain significant speedup in defragmentation if there is no pagefile and disk snapshots (which could be disabled and deleted, and later enabled again if needed).

So I downloaded trial version of Diskeeper and now I could see that there were some files at the end of my C: drive and that was the reason I couldn't shrink it. Defragmented it now with it, but that gave me just about 6GB from 90! There were these system files that Diskeeper couldn't move and it's boot-time defragmentation feature didn't work since it gave me some unhandled exception and asked to reboot.

Then I tried trial version of PerfectDisk and that was the tool I needed. It showed that the unmovable file was MFT and it was movable in boot time defragmantation (worked with PerfectDisk), so I got more shrink space. Then consolidated free space and C: drive's size was down to 30 GB. Defragmented last time to put MFT in adequate place (some free space after it).

It's worth mentioning that graphical tool worked well with simple partitions, but command line tool for the rest. To launch command line partitioning tool, right-click on its icon in start menu and click 'Run as Administrator', and at cmd prompt type diskpart.exe and it has help available then if you type 'help' . Also to move D: disk close to C: disk I just deleted it and created new since partitions couldn't be moved with this tool.

I hope this will help anyone who is frustrating with this.

Now I'm going to install SL PE 1.1 there (SL 3.4f LiveDVD has these freezing problems and, yes, I checked md5sums). Regarding bootloader, haven't decided yet whether to use Grub or something like EasyBCD.

P.S. Sorry for my English.