BleepingComputer.com: Vista Partition Locked

I acquired an HP notebook with Vista pre-installed. The HDD is full and basically contains a Vista partition (which is 95% empty) and another partition containing HP utilities.

I tried to decrease the size of the Vista partition using Acronis Disk Director in order to get space to install a dual bootable XP. Nothing happens. DD does not even show the ribbon representing the space occupied by the partition on the disk.

I tried to split the partition. I get an Acronis error message telling me the operation is not possible.

When I try to copy the partition to a USB disk, Acronis lets me select the Vista partition and the free space on the target disk but the NEXT button remaims grayed out.

On the other hand, I can carry out any DD operation with the HP partition.

Is this a lock-out by Vista or by HP?

Do you have the latest version and updates for Disk Director? It's only recently that it's become "Vista able". There are (IMO) slight differences between the NTFS in XP and the NTFS in Vista (seen when swapping a flash drive from an XP system to a Vista system - it always wants to fix the durned thing).

I suspect that HP hasn't changed the procedure for making it's recovery partitions - so I'd suspect that this was an incompatibility between Disk Director and Vista (but it's only conjecture on my part).

I finally solved the problem after running a chkdsk on the Vista partition. I'll now be able to install XP or w2k-sp4 in dual boot mode instead of using this crappy and constraint-prone Vista.

I am using DD version 10 - Build 2160 which is compliant with Vista.

Just out of curiosity, did you note the errors that chkdsk displayed?