How to resize a Windows Vista partition to use the extra space for dual-booting with Fedora using GRUB?

I just got a new laptop and it came pre-installed with a Windows Vista. But I am a Fedora user. Now, it would be easy for me to just remove Vista and use the entire disk space for Fedora. But the thing is, I thought that it would be nice to keep the Windows partition for non-Linux non-Windows-on-a-VM tasks whatever those tasks are.

Right now, the hard drive has 2 partitions: C:\, which is the primary partition where the current apps installed is already occupying 17GB of hard disk space, and D:\, the RECOVERY partition. What I want to do is to resize the hard disk space of the C drive to 30GB, keep the RECOVERY partition, then use the remaining hard disk space for Fedora 11 while having them dual-boot using GRUB.

How can I accomplish such setup without having the need to reinstall Vista?

Randell

Posted 2009-10-10T15:59:35.507

Reputation: 1 153

Answers

I ended up using the partition shrinking function of Fedora during the Fedora installation. During the installation of Fedora, I shrank the Windows Vista partition to my desired size (50GB). And then I went on with my usual installation steps.

After the restart, choosing other (Windows Vista) showed 'BOOTMGR is missing'. The solution was to boot to Fedora and edit grub.conf to point the second option to the Vista partition.

Randell

Posted 2009-10-10T15:59:35.507

Reputation: 1 153

you can get a Gparted live CD, then boot to Gparted and do any resizing you want :)

phunehehe

Posted 2009-10-10T15:59:35.507

Reputation: 777

Why use GParted when Vista has it's own disk shrink utility? – Randell – 2009-10-11T08:13:55.403

1Actually I use Gparted in the Ubuntu live CD. I just don't like the partitioner that come with Vista. It looks cumbersome to me :D Besides, it doesn't show clearly what is primary, what is extended and logical, which Gparted does. And I'm afraid that I would make some mistake on that. – phunehehe – 2009-10-11T12:28:52.703

I found out that Vista's disk management tool can only resize the partitions down to 50% of the original size. – Randell – 2009-10-12T02:20:31.963