partitioning primary drive in vista

is it possible to partition the primary (system) drive in windows vista without re-installing the OS?
(my laptop came with a 160gig partitioned with one 150 gig sector with OS, and another 10gig sector for backup and i want to change those partitions to different sizes)

and if its not possible, then how does one do this with an OEM version that came with laptop?

 

Here's how you go about it:

Start > Right-Click Computer > Manage.

Then, on either column (of the 2 columns) Click Storage, or Disk Management.

Once you're in Disk Management, you should see your partitions. Your primary partition is most likely the largest one so right-click that partition and click Shrink.

From there, you should be able to resize your partitions.

If you have any other questions let me/us know .

 

I did that today on one of my desktops at work. Very cool & easy in Vista.

 

To resize the primary partition you may need to temporaily turn off the Pagefile. There are a few threads here about this issue already. If the pagefile extends out near the end of the partition, it will inhibit resizing as it cannot be moved. There was mention of a couple of other Vista files that behave this way, also mentioned in the existing threads. Try the search box at the top of the page to find them.

Gary

 

as cool as the built in partitioning is its very limited. i partitioned my 160gb with -10gb for a recovery drive only to

c: 87.8gb
d: 10.3gb <recovery drive
f: 50.7gb < as far as vista would allow.

best to get a 3rd party partitioning system but i dunno which one, good luck tho

 

That's my only issue with the Vista partitioner...it creates I guess you would call safezones which limit how much you can actually partition.

But I haven't really had to squeeze all the space out of an existing partition to add to a new one..

 

I am going through the same thing. Decided to use GParted as Vista would only reduce the OS partition by 4gb. So I reduced the OS partition using Gparted and now have 50gb unallocated space. I want to turn this into a spearate partition/drive for data only. But using Vista won't let me do that as it says insufficient available space. and in GParted it says I cannot have more than 4 parimary partitions - apparently the Dell came with 4 - two of which have drives (C and D (recovery) and the others aren't visible in vista.

Any ideas?