How-To Geek

I've figured out why the vista shrink isn't letting you use any space...

The shrink feature won't let you shrink the volume if it's got immovable system files at the end of the partition, like the hibernation file or the pagefile. I'm researching to see the easiest way to fix this. and defrag the volume properly (not sure if vista defrag will do the trick)

A number of places I've read said that you can try and shrink a little bit, and then vista will let you shrink a little bit more the next time... one guy said he just kept doing it in 8gb increments until he got what he wanted. Obviously your situation is a little more ridiculous.

After you ran chkdsk did you try the gparted boot cd again?

Do you think it has anything to do with this 9MB unallocated shown in the shrink volume window?

http://img11.imagevenue.com/im.....1151lo.jpg

(picture is same one from earlier, drive now has 40GB free, not 24GB)

It looks like the problem is that the MFT is at the very end of the partition. Here's a picture using Auslogics defrag (which is quite nice, I must say)

I think there's a way to move or defrag the MFT... looking into it.

You were right about that MFT business. I did some searching and found out that they can be moved with PerfectDisk:

http://www.raxco.com/products/perfectdisk2k/

I got a free 15-day trial and after one defrag with that I've now got access to all the available space on my drive in the shrink volume utility. Many thanks again for all your assistance.

Any idea how long the partitioning should take? It's been on the loading mouse pointer for about ten minutes now and I don't know if it's working or not.

Ok this problem has not gone away. Even though the shrink volume says I have over 40GB of space, about half an hour after having chosen to shrink 10GB I get an error message saying there is not enough space on the disk. Gparted is doing what it was doing before I ran the PerfectDisk defrag. Any other ideas? Can I just buy an external hard disk and use that to run XP on?

I got the same "not enough space" error, and here's what I did:

1) ran disk cleanup wizard, removed hibernation file and all restore points
2) disabled system restore (advaned system settings, system protection tab)
3) disabled the pagefile (advanced system settings)
4) disabled hibernation option in power settings
5) disabled kernel memory dump (advanced system settings, Startup and Recovery section)
6) rebooted the machine and then deleted the c:\pagefile.sys file
7) ran power defragmenter
http://www.softpedia.com/get/S.....nter.shtml
8) ran auslogics defrag
http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php
9) ran the defrag utility you mentioned to move the mft

I was then able to shrink the disk successfully. You'd then want to re-enable the pagefile and the other options.

This has to be the most infuriating problem I've come across in Vista... I spent a good 8 hours troubleshooting this on my machine yesterday, and am still having very little luck with a good, repeatable solution for fixing this problem. (don't use gparted, it might screw things up unless you follow some very specific and painful steps) The second time I tried all these steps on another machine, it didn't work.

On the good side, this doesn't seem to happen when you first get a machine, only once it's been used for a while.

Which part of advanced system settings lets you disable the pagefile? Oh and how do I delete the c:\pagefile.sys file?

To delete the paging file, you'll have to select to show hidden files and folders, and then run these commands from an administrator mode command prompt:

takeown /f C:\pagefile.sys
cacls C:\pagefile.sys /G geek:F

Replace geek with your username.