Can't partition my hard drive without some engineering degree...

Hi!

Man, am I tired.

I have a Vista machine and I just purchased XP Home with the assumption that partitioning a hard drive would be something easy and that once I do that, all I have to do is follow some guy's directions on how to dual boot and I will have two Operating Systems on one computer.

I can't even go beyond the first step.

What happens is, I open "Computer Management," right-click on my hard drive and hit "Shrink Volume," and it says that I can only shrink by 310 MB, even though I have 91869 MB (89-something GB) of free space open on my 350 GB drive. I have over a quarter of open space on my hard drive

nice and defragged

removed the page file or whatever the hell that was, whatever I did it made my computer SLOWER

and it only lets me shrink 310 MB?

Why did I spend $90 on XP if you aren't going to let me partition my hard drive?

*starts yelling mean things at his computer like a cruel master*

You're a mean, naughty boy *takes a bull-whip and starts lashing at the aluminum case, creating scratches* Oh yes you are.

I am starting to hate computers, ladies and gentlemen. Because I might have to buy more stuff, right? Like another hard drive? Some kind of partition software that I am only going to use once and never touch again? Am I going to have to buy that?

So if you guys are so awesome with your computers, perhaps you can... like... throw some ideas out for me to try. I know you're busy people, you got to tinker with your computers-- I understand. But if you could help me, help me to be more like you, too, maybe we all can spread our geekiness and nerdiness around. I don't like to test things out on my own and watch things break or not work right, I have too much important stuff on my computer to do that.

How can I change the 310 MB into something more decent? Where did that 310 MB come from, anyways? Doesn't it know I have more open space than that? And I remember XP used to have a neat defragmentation graph that showed you all the blocks and stuff on your hard drive--HOW COME VISTA DOESN'T HAVE THIS? How do I know the defrag is working in Vista???

Okay, you're done reading here.

So I assume the 310 MB thing is normal and I should use a third-party program like Partition Logic?

I'll try it out and let y'all know if it works

"You have another problem too. On a dual boot with XP and Vista, XP should be installed first, then Vista. If you do it the other way round you will not see Vista in the boot menu. There is a fairly easy fix for this using a free utility but the name of the program escapes me."

^Is it EasyBCD?

I tried it last night and it said my hard disk was not registered, and didn't go beyond that.

I'd rather not buy another hard drive or some software, is there anything I could do to make the hard disk registered?

here is a good read that should be helpful
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/237014-35-both

Partition Logic

TY Pat, I'll take a look. (EDIT: Hehehe, turns out I had that topic already bookmarked from earlier. TY though, I might skim it again to see if there's anything I missed.)

So far I am defragging my hard drive with PerfectDisk to see if that will bump the 310 MB into a larger number.

And thank you notherdude for sticking around. Usually people just throw their hands up in the air and move on to something else, I greatly appreciate you checking up on my topic

Interesting. Good idea trying that. Makes sense I guess. Noted for future reference.

What does not make sense to me is what about Vista's supposed automatic defragging? You'd think it would do better than that. I would also hope that the drive manager ought to throw up a message about the drive being too fragmented to shrink instead of just telling you 310 meg! Oh well. Perhaps perfect disk is just that much better than Vista's built-in defragging.