Can't partition new laptop

I want to shrink the free space on my grandson's new Toshiba laptop in order to form a partition for data files. When I attempted to shrink the free space through Computer Management the program shows 303,743 MB free space before shrinking and the available size available as 3041 MB. That's not worth bothering with. I attempted to try this using Acronis Disk Director 10 (Vista compatible) but that program also balked at partitioning. I disabled the paging file thinking it may have been unmovable and placed near the outside of the hard disk but that didn't change anything.

What could be blocking the use of all this free space? Toshiba's web site is of no help on this. I also want to do the same thing to my granddaughter's new Toshiba (both are of the same model A305D-S6835). This is the first time I've ever encountered a problem using Acronis Disk Director -- it's always been a solid performer in past instances. Would appreciate any wisdom offered.

 

DD10 does not work correctly with Vista though like you, I don't know the reason why. We recently added a Vista PC with a single 160GB drive partitioned by Acer as hidden recovery partition 10GB, Vista 70GB, Data 70GB, and 10GB unallocated. I tried to enlarge the Data partition with DD10 to utilise the unallocated space but was unable to do it. I cannot now remember the error messages, but did succeed when using Vista's disk management.

 

GeneHo12:

Try the operation from the DD recovery CD when Windows is not running. If you have any problems getting the recovery version working it may be because your Toshiba laptops have hardware that is too new for the "full" recovery environment of DD (the Linux drivers have not been updated in over a year), then try using "safe" mode instead.

 

Thanks -- that didn't occur to me. I'll give that try and report back if it works. Incidentally, I was able to partition my HP Pavilion Vista desktop with DD10 last year with no difficulty.

 

The DD user guide states that Vista is supported.
However, I believe that you have to download an update, not use the version on the retail CD.