Windows 7 - trying to dual boot win7 , cant shrink partition proper

hi , new member here , great site , i had a quick look around , couldnt find an answer to this,


im trying to dual boot windows 7 beside my already installed vista HP , when i try shrink my c partition with the inbuilt vista partition tool , to create room for the windows 7 partition , it will only allow me to shrink roughly 2000 MB of the drive even though there is 45% of a 250 GB drive still available .

they reccomend at least 16GB of free space to install it

where am i going wrong , im a little confused ,

thanks in advance

edit.

i have defrag'ed the c drive and now i get this

Hello Merriman, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Your OEM recovery partition may be preventing you from being able to resize the C: drive. If you have created a set of HP Vista recovery discs to use to restore Vista with instead, then you could delete (HP Tools partition will need to be deleted twice) the two HP partitions and extend C: into them. Afterwards, you should be able shrink C to what you want.

Hope this help,
Shawn

I had the same prob, and nuking the recover partition did the trick. Some are protected that u cant nuke them inside windows easily.

hi again,

i have tries to follow your HP vista recovery discs link , but there is no recovery option after i type it into the start/search box , thanks for the quick reply

regards,

paul.

ok just a quick update to finish this thread for people that might have the same problem , i decided to delve away from the vista partitioning tool and download some 3rd party partitioning software called EASUS pro version 3.5 .
it has worked perfectly for me , partitioning the drive was a breeze , it took maybe 20 mins to partition a 60GB section of my c drive.

another problem i stumbled upon was during the installation process of windows 7 was when i got to 64% of copying the windows files over , the copying process just froze and would not go any further so i tried an installation for a second time and the same happened.

so i was thinking its either a corrupt download from microsoft or a disk read error.
i burned a 2nd copy of the windows 7 iso at the slowest speed that my burner would go which was 2.4x (the last one was burned at 4x ).

i started the process again and i now have the new windows 7 operating system dual booting beside my vista operating system.

i must say it looks really good , i have not gotten a chance to give it a good look over as of yet , but so far so good.

thanks for the help,

regards,

paul.

Paul, I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted out. Thank you for posting back with your results.

the reason why you can only shrink a small bit is that you have unmovable system files far along in your drive. Defrag your drive. That will help.

Think about it like this, as a bar:

[normal stuff] [free space........................] [system files] [extra free space]

If the drive is a bar, the system files are at the end of it, leaving only a small part of the drive to be shrunken because they cannot be moved. Defragging moves them along:

[normal stuff] [system files] [free space.................................................]

That way all the end is left to be shrunken.


Hope it helps, it did for me.

Thanks Ratmann trying that now