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How can I resize the OS partition in Vista to utilize the upgrade workaround?

M

MikeK614

Junior Member
I am trying to install Vista on a friends computer. I purchased the upgrade version from office max, and I tried to use the upgrade workaround in order to install a clean version without having to upgrade over windows xp. I was able to format the partition that xp was installed on, and installed vista successfully without entering a cd key. However, when I went to upgrade from within vista, I received a message that I needed at least 7 GB or something like that free in order for the upgrade to work. The total size of the OS partition is only like 7 GB total so I obviously do not have enough space. The total size of the hard drive is 80GB, with 60+ GB as the storage partition, and the rest for the OS. What would be the easiest way for me to get the required free space to perform the upgrade from Vista? I tried looking for vista compatible partition management software for vista, but none is currently available as far as I have seen. I am also aware of the fact that vista has built in capability to resize partitions, but when I click on the partition the OS is loaded on, there is no option to expand it using the windows partition management. Is there something I need to do in order to be able to expand the C: drive from within the vista management programs? Or should I just forget about trying to resize the partition and just burn all of his files to DVDs, wipe out the whole hard drive and start from scratch, making a larger OS parition?

 
You need to make it a dynamic disk first. I don't recall how to do this off the top of my head and my vista machine is down ATM. Click around, you'll find it.
 
If its not too much trouble & you won't lose any data I'd suggest wiping the current partitions out & starting fresh ... if you have the time you might even wnat to zero-fill the drive too before re-partitioning which returns it to near-virgin state, but its not required.

You also could have used somthing like Partition-Magic to re-size the partitions form within XP before starting the install as long as you formatted the Vista partition in the OS setup itself, but its a little late for that now.
 

yeah, after I formatted the XP partition and realized the situation I was in, I was thinking, gee, itd be great to have windows xp right now so I can just use partitionmagic

 
Or even better to use an older, more reliable version of PQMagic that ran in DOS. Or even barring that you could have built a BartPE disc with the Windows version of PQMagic in it.

And Vista lets you resize partitions on the fly via their disk manager, I only tried it once with an garbage partition in a VM but I don't think it required a dynamic disk or anything.
 
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