I have vista ultimage x86 installed on another partion

xp was on the disk first

xp partion is like a 100g
vista is like 20

tried to shrink xp's 100g using vistas partion management tool, but it won't let me shrink the xp partion?


Anyone know why? does it have anything to do with pagefiles or the like?

looked at pagefiles under vista, it only showed one for the vista partion.


Any help is greatly appreciated

Have you defragged the partition from within XP? How full is the XP partition?

The vista partition tool is limited to protecting the user from him\herself.
Read the introduction here. First line under "When resizing volumes in Windows Vista you must be aware of the following criteria:"

I am assuming your XP partition is a NTFS one? Also pagefiles are unmoveable and thus cant be shrunk. THey are also usually hidden so make sure you are viewing all system files before you determine whether there is one there or not.

I've been having the same problem, because there were some odd locked system files randomly fragmented throughout my drive. This seriously limited my shrinking capability. I downloaded a try-before-you-buy app, Raxco PerfectDisk 2008 and it has the ability to initiate defragging of system files on the next reboot. This system file defragging process itself may be native to Vista, but I'm not that savvy to be able to say for sure.

Anyways, it worked and I was able to shrink the partition as expected (note: this was with an active pagefile at 1.5GB).
My next method to try if that didn't work was to chop up the partition with a GParted LiveCD, which may or may not have caused reliability issues.