Problems Partitioning Vista for a Dual Boot

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.