Notes on moving/resizing Vista partitions

[annoyed]

Hi,

I posted a thread earlier asking about free options for moving/resizing partitions, and here are some notes which others may find useful in the future. In hindsight, it would have been quicker to reinstall Vista + apps - but knowing how to do it now, I could do it in a few hours.

I had temporarily installed Vista on my second hard drive and wanted to move it to the main drive as that drive was quieter and faster. Win2K was there currently. I managed to move it, and get Win2K onto the second drive, but Win2k is not booting, which I will not worry about if I can't get it sorted.

As part of this, I wanted to resize partitions to make room for the Vista installation, and to make that Vista partition < 64GB in case I buy a solid state disc in the distant future.

Parted Magic
Free. People suggested this - it will corrupt your partitions.

The docs mention that the utility it uses (GParted) has a bug when moving NTFS partitions so not to use that feature (disable the feature then, you muppets). For some reason though it insisted on moving the Vista partitions "to the left" when all I wanted to do was shrink it - there was a small bit of space before the Vista partition for some reason.

This caused errors when I booted - the Vista CD did seem to be able to repair them, but I restored it again anyway to be sure nothing was amiss.

Seagate Disc Wizard
Free. Will copy partitions and image/restore them to/from your USB drives. This is a limited version of the Acronis software.

I don't know if it would work if you don't have any Seagate hard drives - I happened to have a Seagate drive.

The major limitation with this is that it will obliterate any existing partitions on the target disc (this is probably to motivate you to buy the Acronis package). This means if you want to move something to the unused space alongside other partitions, it is not possible. It is designed for someone moving to a new hard drive.

I got around it saving images onto a USB drive. One partition is just data, so I back the files up and recreated the partition from scratch after Vista had be imaged onto the drive.

Disc Wizard will allow you to resize partitions to your chosen size during a copy/restore from image. The usabilty of the screen to that is worthy of www.dailywtf.com though - you have to check a box to enable the resize, and then when you get back to that screen uncheck the same box.

VistaBootPro

Nice (free) UI for editing the boot menu settings. Is not able to get Win2k to boot though, now that it is on the 2nd hard drive - invalid BOOT.INI

Vista features: Complete System Backup
This is on some editions of Vista - saved my ass a few times because I had the backups on a USB HD. I have not tried the normal backup yet, not sure how it compares.

Vista features: Partition Shrink
In the disk managment screen, Vista will let you shrink/expand partitions. It seems reliable, but it is extremely limited in how much it can shrink. I had 20GB used in a partition and it would not resize it to less than 80GB. It pops up a message about space for virtual memory etc. but I think the reason it is so limited is because it cannot move data around - you might have only 20GB, but some of that is 80 GB into the drive and it won't move it.

I had to use Disc Wizard instead, which did the job, but is no good if you want to move/restore two or more partitions onto a physical drive.

Vista features: Repair

When you move Vista, use the installation CD repair functionality and it will sort the main boot record for you - it is all done within the installer GUI, no command line needed.

[digital_exhaust]

Parted Magic
Free. People suggested this - it will corrupt your partitions

I can't remember if I mentioned this in your other thread or not, but there is an easy fix for this. Once you have re-sized your Vista partition, boot from an XP cd, and have it save the partition that Vista is installed on. I honestly have no idea why this works, but it does, I have done so several times, and it seems to be the only way to use PartedMagic/GParted with Vista partitions. I'm pretty sure I may have made some mention of PartedMagic being "Vista Ready", and I now (recently discovered) that it's not. That comment was made based on some information given by a member here whom I have a great deal of respect for, but... well, nobody is perfect:)

Nice post OP, well written. A quick note regarding VistaBootPro. It is a nice bootloader, and the price can't be beat, but if you are looking for a bootloader that will handle all OS's, take a look at grub.. it should handle your Win2k just fine... read up a bit first, but I think it should work.

[annoyed]

I can't remember if I mentioned this in your other thread or not, but there is an easy fix for this. Once you have re-sized your Vista partition, boot from an XP cd, and have it save the partition that Vista is installed on. I honestly have no idea why this works, but it does, I have done so several times, and it seems to be the only way to use PartedMagic/GParted with Vista partitions.

The docs make it sound like it has a problem moving partitions in general.

What do you mean by save? You mean recover? If so, I did the same thing with Vista, but I restored over it, just in case everything wasn't 100%.

Nice post OP, well written. A quick note regarding VistaBootPro. It is a nice bootloader, and the price can't be beat, but if you are looking for a bootloader that will handle all OS's, take a look at grub.. it should handle your Win2k just fine... read up a bit first, but I think it should work.

I'm not sure the problem is the bootloader - I think it might be that Win2K is not expecting to be on Disk 2 now. I cannot see or edit the BOOT.INI from Vista for some security reason, and Win2k won't boot.

I think the point of VistaBootPro is it can handle all the complexities of the Vista boot registry.

[Yaemish]

I found that Acronis Disk Director 10 worked resizing from Vista-32/64 while in Windows as well as from a BartPE disk.