Problems partitioning a laptop drive!

[sram]

Hello folks, hope you all doing ok. I bought this toshiba A305-S6858 laptop:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&item=170311083124

for my brother, and as you can see it is a 320 GB drive. You know, it is ridiculous to keep the drive as it is. One would at least create another partition for data. My brother wants to dual boot vista and xp in his laptop. I wanted to to make him two 20 GB partitions and one 260 GB for data. I used my favorite tool, which is--as you might guess--Gparted magic, however it failed to load successfully. I wasn't able to get into the GUI. All I was left with is a command prompt which I can't really use.

I decided to use the infamous acronis disk director 10 which is my second favorite. The software loaded successfully, however the C: drive wasn't re sizable at all! I don't know what these manufacturers use to partition their drives! Am I out of options now? I don't want to wipe out the whole drive and start from zero. I just wanted to add windows xp and a data partition.

What do you guys suggest me to do?


Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks.

 

[criccio]

I say re-try Gparted. Try the Live USB stick version if you have to. You can even try the new/updated version of GParted called Parted Magic.

And FWIW, there is no real need for a separate Data partition... There is no benefit.

 

[sram]

There is something they do to the drive that prevents other software from successfully dealing with it. Someone who missed with a toshiba laptop recently might be able to help.

Thanks criccio, I'll re-try GParted.

And FWIW, there is no real need for a separate Data partition... There is no benefit.

Why? What if I wanted to format the windows drive for some reason? You want me to wipe all my data with it?

 

[criccio]

Hmm, I guess. I always make the mistake and think in terms of my situation where my laptop is only a secondary machine and only has a web browser, Open Office and a few utilities installed. All my documents get automatically backed up to the cloud with Dropbox.

If this is a main machine then yea, I can see how a second partition would be useful.

Good luck.