Problems Partitioning Vista for a Dual Boot

[Icelus]

Dear Linux Forums:

I am a computer science major, and I have decided to install Linux on my machine because Cygwin isn't cutting it as a Unix replacement. Issue is, I want to keep Vista on my computer because there are several applications (Adobe CS3, MS Visual Studio, Maple and Matlab) that I still will need to access. So I am going to try to dual boot Ubuntu (maybe?) and Vista. So I am trying to re-partition the c:/ drive and am failing. Horribly. I logged on to the administrator account, turned off system recovery, deleted pagefile.sys, deleted hibernation files, scanned and cleaned the disk, and defragmented three times. I still can't move all the system files to the front of the disk and although I have 80+ GBs of free space, I can only shrink the partition by about 1 GB. I'm not sure what else to do. I have heard that using gparted makes Vista unable to boot. Researching reveals a work-around using a Vista installation disc. the problem is I don't have said disc: as always, just the license. Is there any software/way I can use to re-partition/shrink the vista partition without causing the boot error? Sorry for the long post and thanks for any assistance.

[daark.child]

You probably could resize using the partitioning tools included in Linux. When I setup openSUSE on my laptop with Vista, the openSUSE installer shrunk the Vista partitions with no problems.

[Icelus]

Thank you for sharing: everything I have heard tells me that re-sizing/partitioning the Vista partition with anything but the Vista tool usually causes boot problems. I may use openSUSE if what you say is the case.

[daark.child]

Thank you for sharing: everything I have heard tells me that re-sizing/partitioning the Vista partition with anything but the Vista tool usually causes boot problems.

First time I've heard of that one. I can assure you that it worked fine for me a few months ago and I've not had any problems since.