Resizing NTFS partition?

I need to split my Vista laptop hard disk -- currently a single NTFS partition -- into two NTFS partitions.

What's the most reliable way to do it? Is it worth paying for Partition Magic, or is there something cheaper or even free? Are the open-source partition tools OK with Vista partitions these days?

This one works great: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

As long as the controller is recognised by the OS. The SAS/SATA controllers in my Poweredges weren't.

A newer kernel on the Live media should cure that.

Cheers

I ended up using a recent xubuntu live cd (which I happened to have lying around), and then installed gparted on that.

You could just use Disk Management to do it. It's the GUI part of diskpart.exe, the official MS tool to resize NTFS partitions since XP.

I'm pretty certain that XP diskpart.exe does not support shrinking. It supports extending though. The GUI supports neither. Not relevant here, but though I'd put that out there.

Didn't work last time I tried (not on this hard disk, though) -- I followed the instructions and it only offered me the option to shrink the partition by 1 or 2 Gb. I want to shrink it by 60Gb or so...

I'll look at gparted. I suspect the problem might be moving stuff out of the way -- does gparted do that?

I was able to successfully shrink a partition using the *vista* version of Disk Management recently. Perhaps they improved it since XP.

This was with the Vista version of Disk Management. I'll try it again today.

Well, whaddya know? I managed to reclaim about 40Gb. I think the main problem is finding a defragger that'll move stuff out of the way. Fortunately, this is a fairly new build, so Windows hasn't had a chance to put stuff in the way...

Certainly not the Windows defragger... Which one did you use?

JkDefrag will do that and is free.

Turns out that Windows hadn't had a chance to put stuff in the way, so the Windows defragger was enough. I'll check out JkDefrag, though -- thanks Bitt.

I've always used Boot It NG to do any resizing/repartitioning.

This is another free defragger that I have had good results with. It is quite fast.

tanstaafl.