There are many hard disk partitioning softwares available for Windows XP, Windows 2000, etc - my favourite being Partition Magic. However some of them are not compatible with Vista and some of them do not support Vista 64-bit. Another reason may be software vendors don't want to bother selling it because Vista already has partitioning feature (shrink or expand) as part of disk management. It's quite a nice feature and it will create the partition without the need to reboot your pc.
But as you can see in the above picture, the size of available shrink space is limited and you can't change it at all. Therefore, sometimes it may be 120 GB out of 500 GB hard disk!!! Then you can't touch the remaining 380 GB. That's simply not good enough for me.
Thanks to GNOME, there is a fantastic software to solve all these problems from free. It's called GParted. All you need to do is download the GParted Live bootable image file from here and burn it to a CD. After that boot your pc from the CD. Step by step procedure can be found here.
Once you have tried GParted, you won't go back to Vista's partitioning at all. That's for sure. Happy partitioning!!!
Last week, I ran into trouble while trying to install Windows XP (as a dual boot) to my PC that already has Windows Vista. If you have never done it but are thinking of doing, then BE VERY CAREFUL!!! There are many things you need to be aware with dualbooting with Vista. After copying files from the CD during installation process, it restarted automatically to boot from XP. But it can't boot any more!!! Neither from Vista nor from XP. It says something like operating system is missing.
After googling for a while, I found out that Vista uses a totally different boot process from XP. Therefore, it must have been messed up by XP installation. I couldn't load boot menu to try safe mode or last known configuration either. Because it's OEM version, I didn't get any install DVD or recovery disc.
Finally I found and downloaded Windows Vista Recovery Disc thanks to NeoSmart. You can download the torrents from the following links. You need to have a torrent software to download them. You only need one depending on the version you have.
Windows Vista 32-Bit (x86) Recovery Disc Torrent
Windows Vista 64-Bit (x64) Recovery Disc Torrent.
After downloading the ISO file, you need to burn it to a CD and boot from the CD (press F12 during power up). I have taken some screenshots for step by step procedure. You can use Vista installation DVD too if you have one.
Now take the Recovery CD out of the drive and restart the pc. You should be able to boot from Vista this time.
I recently found a small ebook called "As a man thinketh" by James Allen. It is such a great book and so short that it takes no time to finish it. But the contents are as precious as gold. I hope you enjoy the book.
As A Man Thinketh
