How to repartition in Vista?

[Peiman]

Hi!

I hope the following text does not bore you I think it is necessary for you to know the whole story.

I hate having just one partition on my Dell laptop. So I decided to repartition th HDD by Vista Disk Manager. For that, I first shrinked C drive to half ( 145GB, more was not allowable ) It was done succesfully. Then I decided to create a partition out of the resulted unallcated space. I was unable to do that at first it told me "not enough available disk space". Then I bought Acronis Direct Suite 10; I converted the unallocated space to two drives ,besides, I splited C: and extracted the fourth drive too. After "committing" this action the windows didn't boot, getting the message " Operation System Missing".

I used Acronic CD ( bootable ) to fix it. It has two options : safe version and full version. First I chose full version but it told me it was unable to find any disk!! Then I went for safe version, It showed that I had a C: partition with the label "None". It could not be opened or edited. I test every likely saving action but all were in vein except deleting the partition and recovering it. By this action the C partition returned along with the unallocated space that I 've shrinked at first.

At this time I resized the C partition in order to regain all the HDD's capacity using Acronic. The same story happened again. After recovring again, surprisingly I found that I can't even make new partitions out of the unalloc space nor with Disk Man nor with Acronic. At this time it says "The action is not valid"! Now, I can not access to 145G of the HDD.

I will be very thanful if someone would answer any of the following questions :

Why Acronic can not make a partition?

Haw can I retrurn the unalloc space to C?

How can I make my favourite partitions?

Does "Reinstallation Vista Disk" provided by Dell with my laptop helps me? (Does it offer me removing current Vista completely and repartitioning all the disk?)

thank U.