Using ADDS 10 to shrink the C partition in Vista

I am using Vista Home Premium with an HP Pavilion 8180. It has a 500gb drive which I have reduced to 321 gb with Vista’s ‘shrink volume’, making a spare partition, but I would like to reduce it further so that I can backup with ATI (whole partition) and make smaller backups. I am assuming that the backup will be smaller if there is less free space as the program must record all the free space somehow – is this true?
I used ADDS 10 to attempt this, from Windows, by creating more free space on the spare partition, taking it from the system one. Although it appeared to be working, when Windows attempted to restart it reported errors and tried to do a repair. Eventually it suggested a system restore which did solve the problem, with the partitions unchanged. Is this because I tried it from Windows and should have booted from the Acronis CD? Is this the same as the Acronis Bootable Media Builder disc?
A lot of questions! You can see that I am new to this!!

 

DerekC:

If your only objective is to make smaller partition backups with TrueImage then you don't need to resize your Vista partition. TI only copies in-use sectors when backing up, so if you have a lot of free space in the partition then it won't affect the size of your backup image at all because unused sectors are not included in the image.

If you want to make a smaller Vista partition for other reasons then yes, you should always do partition operations that modify the Vista partition only when Vista is not running. You'll probably have more success if you boot from the rescue CD and then try shrinking the Vista partition.

And yes, the rescue CD is created by Acronis Bootable Media Builder. Before creating a rescue CD you should check to see that you have the latest version of Disk Director (and True Image; you can include both programs on one rescue disk) by logging into your account on the Acronis web site and checking for newer versions (builds) of the programs. As of today, the latest version of TrueImage Home 10 is build 4942, and for Disk Director it's build 2160. If you don't have the latest builds, download them and install them before creating your rescue CD.

 

Thanks very much - all went well!!