Partitioning for Dual Boot With Vista

[John Moniz]

Hi all;

I just bought a new PC which came with Vista and I want to partition it 
to have mostly Linux space. We had this topic here recently and I recall 
that if the partitioning was done with the Vista partitioner, there 
should be no trouble rebooting Vista. I also recall that Vista may put 
files far into the drive, restricting how much space could be freed.

I have a 500GB drive. I partitioned with the Vista tool and the NTFS 
partition would not go below about 235GB. Truthfully, that leaves me 
lots of space for Linux, more than I ever had. Maybe I'm being a bit of 
a prick, but there's no damn way I want Vista to have half of my drive.

Is there a way to reduce the NTFS partition further without destroying 
Vista? If not, since this PC came with a recovery partition rather than 
a DVD, would I be safe in blowing away Vista, reducing it to something 
like 50GB (maybe 100GB if I'm feeling generous), and recovering Vista 
again? That is, should the recovery program use what's available rather 
than try (and fail) to spread out Vista as before?

As a related question, if I were to leave things alone, is writing to an 
NTFS partition still risky?

Thanks,

John.
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