Free Partition Manager Tool for Windows Vista

I had installed Windows Vista on a new 500 GB hard drive on a new machine running an AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 w/ a Foxconn Foxconn A74MX-K AM2 motherboard. But then I regretted leaving the entire drive as a single partition (drive c:) because I want a partition to hold media files, while the c: drive would be backed up using a disk image tool. I didn't want the image tool build backup files containing these non-critical media files, so a new partition was the way to go.

So I tried to install Partition Magic to do the job, but got a warning message that Partition Magic 8 is not compatible with Windows Vista. Not wanting mess up the drive, I decided to look for other, preferably free solutions. I found a free tool called Partition Logic and burned it on an ISO, but unfortunately it could not recognize the AMD hard drive controller.

But it turned out that Windows Vista has the built-in capability to shrink partitions and also merge partitions. Click on the Windows button, right-click on Computer, select Manage, and then go to Disk Management. Right-click on the partition to shrink or extend, and you'll see the options "Shrink Volume..." and "Extend Volume...". Unfortunately for me, despite the system having 382 GB of 465GB free, it would only let me shrink the partition by a paltry 50 gigs- WTF??? I wanted to shrink it to about 100 gigs, which means a reduction of 282 gigs. I thought about tinkering with disabling swap file, etc, but then discovered that there was another tool to try- an open source program called GParted.

I went over to:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

And clicked on download and got the latest version of the GParted Live CD iso, which I then burned to a CD. Upon booting I got these "Buffer I/O" errors on device sr0" error messages but it still booted up fine. I had problem getting the video to intialize, so I used the command line mode, typed "exit" and it somehow went into the GUI no problem. This puppy then recognized my drive just fine and I was able to use it to resize the partition. It took like an hour and a half to do it, however.

After reboot, however, I got a "Windows failed to start" "File \Windows\system32\winload.exe" "Status: 0xc0000225" error. Apparently Windows lost track of where the boot partition is, so I poped in the Vista install CD and selected Repair which brought me to the System Recovery Options window. It showed that the partition size was 0 MB (yikes!) and the location was "Unknown". I clicked on "Next" and after about a minute a window popped up and said "Windows found problems with your computer's starup options. Do you want to apply repairs and restart your computer?" I clicked "Repair and Restart" and crossed my fingers. After doing a CHKDSK, windows booted up fine!

In the end, I recommend using GParted as the free solution for all your partition editing needs- just make sure you have your Vista DVD ready.