shift a pre-installded Vista?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Timothy Daniels
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Timothy Daniels

I have a new Dell laptop with a pre-installed Vista Business,
and I would like to shift or "slide" its partition forward toward
the start of the hard drive by 10GB to make way for a Linux
dual-boot between Vista and Linux. (This is not a "shrink"
operation.) Does anyone know of a utility that can do this with
Vista? Gparted, BootIt NG, and Acronis Disk Director are the
traditional utilities which come to mind, but I've heard of difficulties
with Vista partitions where the partition was created by the Vista
installer. If you've used any of these or other partitions in their
"Vista compatible" versions, please post about it.

*TimDaniels*
 
If you have freespace at the front of the drive add it to your partition and
then shrink the partition. This will come off the back end. You can't
slide a partition that has no freespace. BootItNG has been Vista compatible
since day one and Acronis is now.
 
Mick Murphy said:
Why do you want to put it at the front?
Click to expand...

There is a 10GB Primary partition in the front that
I don't need (the "System Restore" partition), and I'd
rather not waste it. It's *almost* what I need for Linux
(which is to include a couple servers), but not quite. So
I want to "shift" Vista down to fill that area - something
that could be done with pre-Vista Windows OSes via
various 3rd-party utilities.

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

Here is the way you would normally do it above!
Click to expand...

I've seen that, and it uses the standard Vista
"shrink-from-the-back" feature - not what I want to do.

*TimDaniels*
 
Don't understand your point. The MBR isn't affected by the change in the
partition. If you delete your restore partition, you should always make
sure to contact the computer manufacturer as many times you have to make
other changes to the BIOS or MBR or both. Sometimes the system will end up
hanging looking for the restore partition before moving into the boot
process.
 
There is no "point". That was not a rhetorical question. I asked
it in order to ger an answer to it. I will not go into the details of
the Vista BCD and partition addressing as I don't fully understand
it myself, but if you read the website that I referenced, you'll see
that Vista is "different". So the qestion remains, "Have you tried
sliding a Vista partition with BootItNG that had been created by
Vista?" The purpose of my question is to locate a partition
management utility (preferably the cheapest) that can actually
move a Vista partition that had been created using the new
partition offsets which are being introduced with Vista? I *could*
just start buying and downloading utilities willy nilly and seeing if
they can work with the new partition scheme, but I don't have the
time or the money to do so. There is also a Catch 22 - the new
partition scheme also affects cloning, and I'd have to make a clone
of my installation before experimenting or risk screwing up my
system.

*TimDaniels*
 
Both Acronis and BootItNG have free trials, so cost won't be your problem
and the disk and partition information is only slightly changed by the new
NTFS used by Vista. The initial boot process is similar in Vista and
addressing is to accommodate both MBR and GPT disks.
 
1) Have you tried sliding a Vista partition, that had been created
by Vista, with BootItNG?

2) Have you read the referenced website?

*TimDaniels*
 
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