System Partitioning with Vista
System Partitioning is a little scary, especially if your as stupid as me and don't back your files up before you start.
I have been using Ubuntu installed through Wubu, a very convenient and efficient way for anyone to try out Linux beyond a Live CD or Virtual machine.
While Wubu is great It does have a couple limitations, firstly with hibernation and suspend modes, neither of which work. Not an issue for a desktop PC, but for me using my laptop quite a big drawback. Secondly, apparently installing through Wubu gives a small performance hit to Ubuntu, although I wouldn't know how true this is.
I decided to dual-boot my Vista system with Ubuntu, however had some difficulties with getting the Vista partitioning tool to shrink the main volume.
Vista has the disk management tool which is a little more advanced then the XP counterpart and allows you to shrink, expand and create partitions on the hard drives. It can be a pretty frustrating tool and has a particular aversion to shrinking partitions.
My first attempt got me this message:
There are a variety of reasons why there was no space to create a partition, here they are and also the method you can fix it with:
Not enough HDD space
System Partitioning is a little scary, especially if your as stupid as me and don't back your files up before you start.
I have been using Ubuntu installed through Wubu, a very convenient and efficient way for anyone to try out Linux beyond a Live CD or Virtual machine.
While Wubu is great It does have a couple limitations, firstly with hibernation and suspend modes, neither of which work. Not an issue for a desktop PC, but for me using my laptop quite a big drawback. Secondly, apparently installing through Wubu gives a small performance hit to Ubuntu, although I wouldn't know how true this is.
I decided to dual-boot my Vista system with Ubuntu, however had some difficulties with getting the Vista partitioning tool to shrink the main volume.
Vista has the disk management tool which is a little more advanced then the XP counterpart and allows you to shrink, expand and create partitions on the hard drives. It can be a pretty frustrating tool and has a particular aversion to shrinking partitions.
My first attempt got me this message:
There are a variety of reasons why there was no space to create a partition, here they are and also the method you can fix it with:
Not enough HDD space
- Delete as many files as you can
- Reduce the Recycle bin size (by default it takes 10% HDD space)
- Run the disk cleaner and get rid of hibernation and temporary files
- Remove all but the most recent System Restore points
- Disable virtual memory for now
- Use a tool like Auslogic Defragmenter
- MFT files, such as you can see below, on the the end of a volume will prevent partition shrinking. They're a pain to move and I don't have an answer for that one.
- Use a tool like CCleaner to track down any temporary and junk files which Windows misses.
