System Partitioning with Vista

System Partitioning is a little scary, especially if your as stupid as me and don’t back your files up before you start.

I have been using Ubuntu installed through Wubi, a very convenient and efficient way for anyone to try out Linux beyond a Live CD or Virtual machine.

While Wubi is great It does have a couple limitations, firstly with hibernation and suspend modes, neither of which work. Not an issue for a desktop PC, but for me using my laptop quite a big drawback. Secondly, apparently installing through Wubi gives a small performance hit to Ubuntu, although I wouldn’t know how true this is.

I decided to dual-boot my Vista system with Ubuntu, however had some difficulties with getting the Vista partitioning tool to shrink the main volume.

Vista has the disk management tool which is a little more advanced then the XP counterpart and allows you to shrink, expand and create partitions on the hard drives. It can be a pretty frustrating tool and has a particular aversion to shrinking partitions.

My first attempt got me this message:

There are a variety of reasons why there was no space to create a partition, here they are and also the method you can fix it with:

Not enough HDD space

• Delete as many files as you can
• Reduce the Recycle bin size (by default it takes 10% HDD space)
• Run the disk cleaner and get rid of hibernation and temporary files
• Remove all but the most recent System Restore points

Paging Files

• Disable virtual memory for now

Defragment

• Use a tool like Auslogic Defragmenter
• MFT files, such as you can see below, on the the end of a volume will prevent partition shrinking. They’re a pain to move and I don’t have an answer for that one.

Clean

• Use a tool like CCleaner to track down any temporary and junk files which Windows misses.

Hopefully this helps you if you find yourself in the same situation. However that said there are no guarantees, the longer you’ve been using your PC the harder it will be to resize partitions without a complete reinstall. Make you reactivate anything you turned off such as System Restore.