[SATLUG] Installfest & Vista

[Sean Carolan]

> > I recently dual booted a friends laptop running vista. From what I
> > heard it is not safe to resize a Vista NTFS partition with any linux
> > tool (I hear it doesn't handle NTFS the same as XP) so you are
> > supposed to use the built in "shrink" of Vista's disk manager. This
> > works, but for me it only shrank it to half the size and would not go
> > any less (not sure why), so it's not quite as flexible. What we ended
> > up doing instead since it was a new laptop and vista was a fresh
> > install was to wipe the drive, install vista on a smaller partition,
> > and then install linux in the remaining. It worked, but that might
> > something everyone wants to do. Anyone know of a way to shrink vista
> > more than half safely?

The Ubuntu installer has a built in resize function that I have used
several times to resize Windows XP NTFS partitions.  Unless Vista's
NTFS implementation is radically different than XP's I don't see why
it wouldn't work.  This is all speculation of course, as I don't have
a copy of Vista to work with.