Available space to partition is not as much as it should be

i7prince

New Member
I am needing to partition my hard drive to place either windows 7 or ubuntu. not sure which i'm going to place on now but the problem is this. My hard drive has 87.6 gb free but when i try to partition it either through the vista partitioner or command prompt it only shows about 6 gb free. i'd like to have much more room just in case i want to put on windows 7. any explanations? I just restored my computer to the way it was purchased through the windows restore function built into the laptop.
 
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You can't partition another partition. Sounds like you are trying to take the free space of one partition and use that, you can't. The only thing you can do is install partition magic or something similar and reduce the size of the one partition and create another one.
 
Or download Ubuntu or GParted Live.

They will let you "shrink" your current partition and create a new one.

Be careful though. GParted will wipe Windows if you let it...
 
i'm using the vista partitioner to try to shrink the volume. i've done it on other computers with no problems but it is not allocating the space it should. should i do a format on that drive, reinstall windows, and go from there?
 
i'm using the vista partitioner to try to shrink the volume. i've done it on other computers with no problems but it is not allocating the space it should. should i do a format on that drive, reinstall windows, and go from there?

Yes, you could put your Retail Vista disk in and do it that way I guess.

Sometimes it won't let you resize the C: partition though.

GParted will for sure.
 
Yes, you could put your Retail Vista disk in and do it that way I guess.

Sometimes it won't let you resize the C: partition though.

GParted will for sure.

so do i have to have a linux partition to use gParted? I only have my vista drive and the windows backup drive that hp installed. how can i easily use gparted without wiping my c drive?
 
ok i downloaded it, burned it with roxio as an image to a cd, but my computer is not recognizing the image. it is picking up on files and folders but it does not run like i'm used to seeing with other linux iso discs like ubuntu. why is it not burning right? i am on a 32 bit platform. does that make a difference?
 
thanks!

Got it to work. Took me a bit to get my cd writer to work right but it did and it solved the issue. I'll be sure to keep the disk I made and use it again in the future. After using it I'm done using the c prompt to partition the drives. That made it quick and easy
 
Got it to work. Took me a bit to get my cd writer to work right but it did and it solved the issue. I'll be sure to keep the disk I made and use it again in the future. After using it I'm done using the c prompt to partition the drives. That made it quick and easy

I'm with you. I gave up trying to get Windows and other apps to let me manage my partitions.

GParted is the shizzle. :good:
 
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