Shrinking partition in Vista

[bimbim]

I want to resize a partition on an external drive. I tried to shrink it with disk management but got error : 'The microsoft shadow copy service entered the running state ' .Can't really find much of help on Google. Can anyone explain what this means & offer a possible soloution ? Thanks

[ACtheTROLL]

this might help

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/w orking-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-ina dequacy-problems/


Acronis disc director is what you want ....
or if you have a maxtor (now seagate) disc a free copy of maxblast
both will painlessly resize partitions

[ACtheTROLL]

bimbim

This month's computer shopper
(june!!) has a copy of paragon disc manager on it ... it's free and is just as good as the competition if you keep it simple ....

certainly worth the cost of the mag


Neil

Partition magic is still my all time favourite (I use it most days).

I've had problems on HP and dell machines thanks to the restore partitions (f11!) which is why I went to acronis

no restore partition ... no problem
but finding a copy of pM is getting harder these days

[bimbim]

Thanks all . I've read that neither Partition Magic nor Acronis are compatible with Vista. However a friend is giving me her old machine with XP installed so I can use p.m. on that as the disc I want to resize is only used for storage & not got the system on . I am intending to re-partion the C: drive though at later date & will look into Paragon .

[ACtheTROLL]

you heard wrong bim!
PM is possibly less compatible ... see above re restore

but the latest ver of acronis (and the one before that) is 100% (look on the website if you doubt)

I use PM almost daily ... preparing both vista and XP machines (also drive image) -
(no restore partn) ... using a win98se bootable CD plus the PM and DI files.
PM works perfectly on NTFS discs despite being booted with fat32 os and DI images any "straight" partition.

acronis is loaded either to the operating system ... like any other prog (there is the option to make a bootdisk for emergency use also) ... and works 100%

paragon also works well (do you honestly think a mag would give it away without warnings if this wasn't the case)

now for the gotcha ... if you boot a vista disc from XP you will have problems ... XP sees the new format restore points as corrupt system files and will delete them (google dual booting XP & Vista

but your choice .... come back for advice on how to recover your system ;-)

and paragon won't be free if you don't strike now

[bimbim]

Nowhere did I say I was planing on booting a Vista disk with XP . Using a seperate machine with XP installed to partition an external disc with no OS on is a different matter . Thanks for the advice but hold the sarcasm .

[ACtheTROLL]

bim

you asked - I just warned of possibilities ...
(you can tell 'cause the sentence starts with "if")
pardon me for warning you
.....you know best ....good luck