Partitioning for Dual Boot With Vista

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 01:29:26PM -0400, John Moniz wrote:
> 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?

Many recovery programs only support restoring to original state, which
means it would rewrite the partition table too.

If you try resizing with something other than vista, you often break the
boot loader in vista.  You can fix that using the recovery consle very
easily, excapt that is only found on real install disks (not recovery
DVDs).  The upgrade anytime (or whatever they call it) DVD that some
machines ship with is in fact a full DVD and has a recovery console.

In my case when my wife resized her vista partition, we used gparted
(from a livecd) to resize it, and then booted from one of the vista rc
DVDs I downloaded back when those were available, and used the recovery
console on the RC DVD to fix the boot loader, and vista was perfectly
happy.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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