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.

Vista Disk Shrink

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!!!

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