Unable to Resize, Move or Copy Vista Primary Partition

[jandrews404]

I must be missing something here. I have a 150GB WD Raptor on which Vista was originally installed. I had to reinstall my OS so I created a second partion on the C: drive and reinstalled Vista on it. I then formatted the original partition (which is approx 120GB) and have a clean copy of Vista on the new partition. (which is approx 20GB). Now I am unable to increase the size of the new partition nor can I merge, move or copy it. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Regards

http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k186/jandrews404/DDScreenShot.jpg

[jandrews404]

Sorry image was cut off...

http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k186/jandrews404/DD10.jpg

[MudCrab]

Are you saying that DD won't let you resize the new 20GB partition?
Do you get an error message or are the options just not available?

Have you tried Vista's Disk Management to see if it will let you expand the partition?

Have you tried from the DD cd booted into either the Full mode or Safe mode versions?

Why do you want Vista installed at the END of the drive? That's the slowest access area and slowest throughput area (most times 1/2 the speed of the beginning of the drive).

[DrTeeth]

-{ Quote: "Are you saying that DD won't let you resize the new 20GB partition?
Do you get an error message or are the options just not available?

Have you tried Vista's Disk Management to see if it will let you expand the partition?

Have you tried from the DD cd booted into either the Full mode or Safe mode versions?

Why do you want Vista installed at the END of the drive? That's the slowest access area and slowest throughput area (most times 1/2 the speed of the beginning of the drive)." }-

The OP is trying to work with the 20Gb partition using DDS, which is not behaving; hence his posting here. He is not asking for advice on partition placement.

[K0LO]

jandrews404:

You will be unable to make any modifications to the Vista partition when Vista is running. The best way to do this is to boot into the recovery version of Disk Director.

Create a bootable recovery CD by using the Bootable Media Builder menu item in Disk Director. Then boot into the recovery version of Disk Director. Try the "Full" version first. If it sees the disk that Vista is installed on, then you can do the operations this way. If you can't see your disk in "Full" mode then try the "Safe" version.

From your picture it looks like you just need to resize the Vista partition to include all of the unallocated space to its left. When finished, try booting into Vista again. You will probably get an error message about winload.exe being missing. The reason for this is that the new Vista bootloader references the location of the start of its partition by absolute sector number, and you have moved the starting sector when you resized. To fix the Vista bootloader you will need to boot with the Vista DVD and do a repair operation.

[Brian K]

-{ Quote: "Why do you want Vista installed at the END of the drive? That's the slowest access area and slowest throughput area (most times 1/2 the speed of the beginning of the drive)." }-
Very good advice.