Windows XP / Vista Resizing Partitions

[johnsonbrewer]

Greetings,

Is there an almost painless way to resize my hard drive partitions? I have XP on the first partition @ 50 GB, and Vista on the remainder of the drive in a partition of 450 GB. I'm out of room on the XP partition and have plenty of room to grab from Vista's partition. XP is physically first, then Vista, and I understand there can be an issue with the boot record of Vista if its physical location changes. I have Partition Manager 9.0 and it goes through the motions of making the desired changes but then encounters an error at the very last step. Any ideas?

 

[JackMDS]

No guarantee, but if partition manager does not do it may be this will.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-002-_-Product
.

 

[Blazer]

acronis disk director will do it, no dout about it, but you do have to commit the changes you make.

 

[Perryg114]

I have used Acronis Disk Director 10 on Win XP and on Win 7 without problems. I installed the software on the computers instead of working from the boot disk. It installed fine on Win 7. Acronis Trueimage 11 seems to work fine on Win 7 as well. If these apps work in XP and Win 7, I would assume they would work in Vista. I got both for like $35 at newegg a while back.

Perry

 

[Nothinman]

Gparted should work fine and is free, although you may have to repair the Vista bootloader after the change.

 

[johnsonbrewer]

I tried Gparted a couple of years ago and evidently it was smarter than me. Is it freeware, I can't remember.

 

[Blazer]

from within vista you may be able to shrink the Vista partition size since its so large, reboot into vista again and expand XP's partition, but that may leave xp nonbootable till repaired, then you will have to repair vista to bring back a dual boot, acronis disk director would be the safe-est bet.

 

[johnsonbrewer]

If I shrink Vista's partition which is physically second on the hard drive, it will add space at the end of the partition not at the beginning next to XP's partition. I want to slide Vista down and leave a gap that XP can then fill.

I will probably plunk down the $$$ and get disk director, just want to know for certain that it will do what I want before spending the dough. I thought for sure Paragon Partition Manager would do this.

Thanks for all the replies.