Vista - Shrink Volume woes....

I am trying to make a data partition in Windows vista. The idea is that I'm going to copy my Documents, Music and Pictures to this new partition. I'm doing a fresh install of vista on the original partition (C:\), and then I'm going to move my data back, and absorb the data partition.

The problem is, even though I have 90 some odd gigs of free space, it will only let me shrink the partition less than 12 gigs. I've tried running three different defragers, running the clean up wizard, and deleting shadow copies. Still no luck. Any ideas?

so if you have 12 gigs space used - that makes sense...
whats the problem?

edit: if the actual size of vista installation confuses you - keep in mind the page file and possibly hibernation dump... oh and don't get me started on the whole side-by-side Vista feature... which reminds me - expect your Vista "windows" folder to grow up by 5-10 gig over its life time.

I mean it will only let me make a 12 gig partition out of 90 gigs of available space.

are you sure thats not the size your old partition begin resized to? What tool you using to make partitions?

It's vista's built in partition manager.

It list's the info on the main partition as:

• Total Size before shrink: 250 gigs (give or take)
• Size of available shrink space: 11 gigs
• Total Size after Shrink: 239 gigs

I'm only using something like 140 gbs of memory, so I should have 90 gigs or so of space I can work with. I only need 25 for what I'm wanting to do, but it won't let me go past 11.

I've been through this process before, when I was playing with ubuntu. It was incredibly easy to shrink the partition to the exact amount I wanted.

ok... so then going back to defrag utils you used - were those windows applications or something that loads up from boot floppy/cd ?
The reason it matters because:
1) drive partitions don't span multiple chunks of drive space. I.e. your C partition cannot just give up some space in the middle, it has to be solid.
2) windows (not just vista) has bunch of protected files that you can't possibly move while windows is loaded
So... if you have your system protected files sitting somewhere at 239 gb from the start of C, then windows app would not be able to move them, then that would be exactly response partition manager would give you.

In general I would recommend PQ Magic for that task. It was a while but i think it will move windows' crap np without any additional defragmentation.

On the side note though... Why split 250gb drive that already has only 90gb free? Just buy extra drive. Problem solved.

So, basically, it seems that all you want to do is to backup some stuff before you reinstall and you don't intend to keep the partition? Here's some ideas:

1. Don't format the drive when you do the fresh install. Then all the stuff will still be there.

2. Get an external USB drive, or a bunch of USB FlashRAM sticks and backup the stuff to them.

3. Temporarily (or permanently) install a second hard drive to copy the stuff to.

4. After you have everything backed up. Reinstall Vista, and during the install, partition the drive into two sections - one for the OS, one for data. From then on, store all your music, pictures, etc. on the data (D) drive and you can then, in future, format C: without worrying about them. (In other words - keep all that stuff on D:, don't "absorb " the data partition.)

I was also going to suggest either an external hard drive, or slave an older drive if it is kicking around.

If you are hellbent on using that drive, download a trial version of Acronis and shrink the volume. Also, if you are linux savy, go with GParted. If you don't know much about partitions or repairing a corrupt windows boot mgr or record, then don't bother with anything other than another drive.

Vista's Diskpart blows, FYI.