I bought a new computer with Vista a couple months ago, but now I'm starting to get bored with it and was thinking of trying out Ubuntu 7.10 I have the CD and everything but I don't want to install it over my Vista installation because I would like to go back and forth between the two. Now, here's my problem. I've been trying to use the Disk Management tool that came with Vista. I have a 320GB Seagate HDD but whenever I want to shrink the volume, it'll only give me a max of about 7gb. I need more than that for tooling around in Linux. So I tried to defrag and see if I could get some more space. This time it said it would give me less. So I'm like "screw it" I'll try it and expand it in Linux if I have to. Well lo and behold, the shrink fails for no reason at all. It tells me to check the system event log, but I don't know where to look or how to get there. Attempt number 2 was to use the Diskpart utility that came with Vista. I follow the instructions that I found and tried to create a partition with a max of 20GB and failing that a min of 10. Diskpart says that "The specified shrink size is too large". So I try something else, I tell it to shrink what it can. It turns around and says "DiskPart has encountered an error: Access is denied. See the system event log for more information"...wtf... there's the event log again. So I come here to AfterDawn seeking aid, how can I go about creating a partition big enough to install Ubuntu 7.10 on a computer that has been running Vista. Google failed me, so I'm hoping someone here can help.
That's what I had been trying to do, but it wouldn't work, I kept getting an error message in Vista. I found a work around though, I used GParted to force the partition and then restored Vista's boot sector and now I've got a 20GB partition, now I just need to install Ubuntu and I'm good
