Shrinking vista partition won't shrink much - I have 20GB free?

[EJ123]

I will post a pic here after I am done backing up files.

I have just over 20GB of empty space on C:. When I click it under disk-management, the window comes up and says I can only resize it 192 MB less than what it is.

But I have 20GB free.

Any ideas on what is wrong? I also have this odd 9.56GB partition that is empty. DM says it's "EISA configuration"...whatever that is.

I am planning to allocate about 10GB for F11 if this pans out ok.

[tdell]

Reduce the size of your swap file, delete all unnecessary files, defrag and try again.

Tom

[EJ123]

Now it says I cannot resize it at all!

Please refer to the picture

[stoat]

Hello EJ123,

I think that partition (and the whole drive, actually) is too full to shrink. It's hard for me to read the numbers in the screenshot, but it looks to me like 10.1 GB free in a 68.77 GB partition. You can't get enough space from that for a Fedora system. Vista's Disk Management utility is doing you a favor. It's not unheard of for people to damage operating systems by aggressive partition manipulation with a partition manager. Vista (and any other OS) needs some free space to wiggle around in.

[EJ123]

All right, thank you for that. . I think I will hold off on using that. I will most likely do the persistent install of Fedora 11 on a USB 8GB.

I will follow this man's tutorial: http://linuxsoftwareblog.com/blog/?p=156

I hope it goes well!

[stoat]

Straining my eyes and zooming the image and recalling your 20 GB makes me think I over-estimated how full the Vista partition really is. Maybe that's 18.something GB. Anyway, it doesn't change my opinion about squeezing an OS too much. And people really do regularly bust operating systems trying to resize them. You'd need a good 10 or so GB for a typical Fedora system with some elbow room, and that still wouldn't leave Vista much elbow room. This Fedora 11 I'm using now was installed with no packages or groups selected in Anaconda and was then minimally built up with yum and uses XFCE as the desktop. Now df says it's using 5.2 GB. A default Gnome or KDE installation will need more. And nifty additional things of course will need more.

But I have heard of Vista doing this before even when there is clearly plenty of space. I was Googling around some about it. There's plenty to read. Here is one example that sort of explains how it can happen and offers some ideas for try for it...

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...uacy-problems/

[SaGS]

Originally Posted by EJ123

Now it says I cannot resize it at all!

Just after it says it cannot resize it, right-click ‘My Computer’, select ‘Manage’ and take a look in the event logs, it shoud tell why. Does it say something about an unmovable ‘$Bitmap’? That happened to mee too. It seems that particular NTFS control file is allocated in the middle of a new partition, so you cannot shrink a partition to less than about haft the size it had at the time you formatted it. I did not find any solution, except backup all files/ delete partition/ recreate at desired size/ format/ restore files.