Disk Management problem in vista.

[jeremy860]

ok heres the story. I had windows xp installed on C: (primary partition) and then I got vista and installed it onto a new partition (logical partition i think) and I also have another little partition for my important files.

well vista impressed me so much that I wanted to totally remove windows xp from my system. so from inside vista I just went into the C: drive and selected all files and hit delete. After that I opened up vista disk management tool since partition magic does not work for vista yet and the plan was to make my G: partiton (vista) the primary partition and just delete the C: partition completely and then make G: into C: drive. Well disk management is giving me a bunch of errors and wont let me do my work. I took a few screenshots so you can get an idea of what I am talking about.

here is what my current partition setup looks like. C: is the old win xp partition, G: is windows vista, E: is important files.

http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/7654/diskmanagmentle6.jpg

Notice when I try to delete C: its all grayed out.

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/9008/di...nodeleteve1.jpg

As you can see disk managment is only allowing me to shrink down 15mb out of 45Gigs?

http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/1453/sh...ionerrorqr2.jpg

OK I am no expert but I think the reason why everything is grayed out is because C: is the primary partition? How would I go about making my vista pertition the new primary or finding somekind of workaround?

Thanks in Advance,

Jeremy

[Scarecrow Man]

OK. A few problems.

Since your C: drive was installed with XP First, it contains the boot record. This cannot be deleted or else your computer will not boot. You can resize this partition with freeware tools such as GParted.

Secondly, I am unsure if booting from a logical partition is supported, although I think it can. If it can, you just need to modify your boot sector to have Vista as the default. Since Vista no longer uses a boot.ini, this process is a bit different.

You can find more information here http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/tips/Debug_Vista.mspx

[tk27]

OK. A few problems.

Since your C: drive was installed with XP First, it contains the boot record. This cannot be deleted or else your computer will not boot. You can resize this partition with freeware tools such as GParted.

Secondly, I am unsure if booting from a logical partition is supported, although I think it can. If it can, you just need to modify your boot sector to have Vista as the default. Since Vista no longer uses a boot.ini, this process is a bit different.

You can find more information here http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/tips/Debug_Vista.mspx

are these xp screenshots?

afaik vista will rearrange lettering so it shows itself as located on c: (even if you know it's not, that's why it is always a good practice to label partitions).

what i would recommend:

backup your e: (and any important files) to d: (your vista partition is on the minimum requirements border). regain space from partition e. don't shrink/defrag/chkdsk anything without a proper backup.

good luck