VISTA Shrink Process.

I don't know where to start At the beginning I guess which seems like ages ago but it was only a few hours ago Okay, I wanted to shrink my 650gig C drive down to 85 or so. I read a tutorial on the net about how to do it and they said that you could do it by defragging with Perfect Disk, defragging the System Files with it, and then performing a few other steps which would allow you to shrink C to a lot smaller than the 350 gigs it was originally allowing me to do.

The steps were to turn off hibernation and delete the files, turn off system restore and delete files, and turn off the page file.Then perform a defrag and then a system file defrag on boot up, then shrink.

I did this and then repeated the "rinse, lather, repeat" about 3 times to get my C drive down to 85 gigs and leave the biggest part of my 750gig HD for archiving only. Seemed like a good idea at the time So the Shrink process went well. Each time I did a System File defrag with Perfect Disk, figuring that each time the drive shrunk, it could move the MFT file a little closer in thus allowing for more shrinkability. It seemed to work.

After I got C drive down to 85 gigs, I immediately restarted and re-stored my page file settings to "let Vista manage" it, and re-started System Restore and created a new restore point.

But when I re-set the page file I got the message: "Another page file exists, do you want to replace it with this one?" I said, sure, why not? I have a feeling I should have said no. But I moved on NOW I had a 600 gig unallocated section that I needed to format to NTFS. But Vista Disk Mgmt said I could not format it because I already had the limit of 4 partitions:

1. The EISA drive
2. OS C drive
3. Recovery Drive D - came with the Dell
4. Rip Process Download R - I created with Paragon Partition the other day
then
5. Unallocated - the partition I just created by shrinking C drive with Vista

I knew there was a limit on the number of partitions you could have, which is why I fired up Paragon Disc Manager, which is supposed to do this kind of thing...........