Vista Partitioning Problem!

[cal9745]

Here is a picture of my current drive situation:

http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/3678/capturejy6.jpg

I recently had a XP partition in the "free space" (which I deleted because I didn't need it and it didn't boot anymore). The built-in Vista partitioner has the "extend" option grayed out so I cannot use that. I tried using diskpart.exe, which also did not work.

I read that doing what I'm trying to do is near impossible, or at least very hard. PLEASE help I'm wasting away 150gb!

 

[nerp]

You can't expand the active system partition within the OS. You have to either use a third party tool which might fail or backup your data and install fresh with the partitions set up the way you want them. Considering you MUST back your data up before using a third party tool, you might as well not give it a chance to fail and do a full blown reinstall and be done with it once and for all.

 

[cal9745]

That is not the answer I wanted to hear, but thanks!

Edit:

If I installed another Vista Business inside the free space (without deleting the partition I currently using), would I eventually be able to extend the new Vista into the one I'm using now? I have 20+gb of things don't feel like backing up.

 

[Nothinman]

You can resize the system drive, but you can't move the start of a filesystem with the built-in Vista tools.

 

[efc321]

Had the same thing happen to me. Downloaded system recue CD from http://www.sysresccd.org/Download . You do not have to down load and use thier download tool. Just down load the ISO and burn a CD with it. I liked Partion Magic's interface better but this is free and works. Thier is always a chance of corupting everthing so as others have stated a back up is a good idea before using third party programs like this.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Originally posted by: efc321
Had the same thing happen to me. Downloaded system recue CD from http://www.sysresccd.org/Download . You do not have to down load and use thier download tool. Just down load the ISO and burn a CD with it. I liked Partion Magic's interface better but this is free and works. Thier is always a chance of corupting everthing so as others have stated a back up is a good idea before using third party programs like this.

I second the sysreccd suggestion and suggest the gparted tool within it. I imagine that other live-cds of linux like maybe ubuntu/gentoo also might have a comparable version of gparted available.

I had two vista partitions, like 40 GB and 100 GB,
the system partition (40) was too small, so I shrunk the 100GB partition to 90GB leaving a gap where it started, then as resized (expanded) the system partition to 50 GB.

the gparted crashed on me a few times when it was scanning the drives *before* or *after* any significant operation was underway, but it never had a problem doing the actual resizing operations.

When I booted vista it detected the change and scanned the disks for a while but there was no problem detected and then it asked to be rebooted and worked normally ever after that.

also as I recall I think I had to manually do startx or something to get x-windows running on sysrescd before I could run the gui gparted program... but otherwise that a few non-critical unpolished aspects it worked fine. I've used past versions of it for years on similar projects.