How does vista decide how much HD space to let go of?

Topher · New Member Joined: 11 Jun 2025 Posts: 4 Location: Alabama

My son-in-law has vista on his desktop with 350 GB HD. He wants to dual boot vista and Linux to try out Linux. He ran defrag and we saw 330 GB free. But when we used the vista tool to partition or let go of space, all it would let us have is 11 GB. We could go lower but not higher. We ran defrag again, but that didn't gain anything. Does anyone know how vista decides how much to give up? I haven't run into this before. But I only have done this on two vista boxes. Since he uses his computer to do video editing for his school, I didn't want to mess things up for him. I really only wanted to grab about 18-20 GB, so I thought it would be no problem. M$ just doesn't like anyone else in its sandbox Sad

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JP · Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2025 2:50 am Post subject:

I've never used M$ vista, so I can't answer that question, but if he want's to try out Linux, 11 GB is plenty to run most of the good distros ....... I've got 5 partitions on a 30 GB drive and had 5 different distros installed at one time - sidux, Dreamlinux, antiX, Mepis, and UbuntuCE ..... I run most of the distros - Dreamlinux, Mepis, antiX, on 5GB partitions because they usually are below 750MB for the distro and any extra partition I can use for my /home ..... I don't know what distro he's looking at, but 11 GB should suffice if he's wanting to consider a dual-boot until you get an answer about vista hogging the whole drive Wink

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jester · Sr. Member Joined: 19 Apr 2025 Posts: 1166

Have you tried with diskpart.exe from the Command Prompt?

Most of us here would recommend a linux-based tool rather than trusting our disks to an MS tool (not that we're biased at all...) - take a look at GParted?

edit: you should probably be seeing a message like below when using that GUI tool:

Germ · Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2025 10:49 am Post subject:

yea, use the gparted or parted magic live CD.

http://partedmagic.com

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

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Topher · New Member Joined: 11 Jun 2025 Posts: 4 Location: Alabama

I know I could have installed Linux on 11 GB and may do that anyway, if we can't figure why vista won't release more. But I did want a little more room in case he really gets into it. I was just mystified as to why we could only get 11 GB.

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lynch · Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2025 2:26 pm Post subject:

Topher · New Member Joined: 11 Jun 2025 Posts: 4 Location: Alabama

Thank you. I guess that explains what is going on. M$ sure doesn't like anyone else playing in their sandbox. I don't feel comfortable doing all that in vista as I just have never used it and do not want to start now.. I'll let my son-in-law try it if he wants to. He has also wanted to get another hard drive, so I'll leave it up to him how he wants to proceed. But I will probably install Linux on the 11 GB if that is all we can get right now.

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