reducing Windows Vista to install FreeBSD dual-boot

[Leslie Jensen]

Anders Troback skrev:
> On Wed, 6 May 2009 14:08:27 +0200
> Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> wrote:
> 
>> El día Wednesday, May 06, 2009 a las 01:26:50PM +0300, Manolis
>> Kiagias escribió:
>>
>>> Sure, You can even reduce Vista's partition from Control Panel -> 
>>> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.
>>> Right click on the partition and select to shrink. The amount that
>>> it will allow you to shrink will vary (probably depends on the
>>> fragmentation) but I guess you will be able to get 50G on a 200G
>>> disk.
>> I did so and was only allowed to shrink the partition to some 125
>> GByte. I even moved before the swap to some other partition, reserved
>> for of DELL recovery.
>> I re-booted and hoped that it let me now shrink the 125 even more,
>> but no luck. So, at the moment I only have around 100 GByte for
>> FreeBSD free, which is a lot, compared with other servers I have
>> here. 
>>
>>> Then install 
>>> FreeBSD as usual, but do not allow it to install any boot manager
>>> (it will mess with Vista's BCD system). After installing, use
>>> EasyBCD (free download) within Vista to add FreeBSD to the boot
>>> menu.
>> Thanks for the hint.
>>
>> 	matthias
> 
> Before you shrink you need to defrag you partition and normally you
> can't do it with the defrag tool that are built into Vista, you need
> something like PerfectDisk. You can get a trial version of PerfecDisk
> and you only need it once so that's not an issue:-) You have to do a
> system-files-defrag-on-next-boot (don't remember the exact options
> here)!
> 
> \\anders
> 


I've done this a few times and the best procedure is to use the Parted 
magic CD and resize the partition. The Vista shrink tool is not 
something I would recommend. You don't have to think of defragging when 
you use Parted Magic.

/Leslie