Hi, Al.

>Some utilities may have advanced knowledge of Windows internals so they can successfully shrink partitions even if system files are at the end of the partition. Maybe you could contact the makers of various utilities such as http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/ to see if they have this advanced support (I don't know off the top of my head).

I'll try Disk Director. Hope it can make it.

>There are some open-source disk management utilities that you could try: GPartEd (liveCD) and/or KPartEd and related NTFSCLONE image backup/restore utilities available on LiveCDs such as Knoppix.

I know about this, and I actually tried before with GPartEd, but it has several problems with the Vista partition. I will discard any closer-to-Windows thing first. I have backups for everything already, but the idea of having to restore and fix many things by hand is not appealing, you know... :)

>Be aware that even if you're successful in shrinking the XP partition, you'll probably have to at least image the Vista partition, blow it away, combine the new free space plus old Vista partition then restore the image to the new, larger partition. Vista may not like this - either being in a larger partition or at a different starting sector on the HD, either due to its boot process or due to its copy protection. You may end up having to reinstall Vista on the new larger partition.

I guess that once I have a separate partition I can merge it with Vista's from Vista's own Disk Management console. But I have to do that first.

>Another brute-force way to go might be to get a larger HD for your laptop, then image both partitions and restore them to the new one. But large laptop HDs are probably still pretty expensive.

Well, I also though of investing two-three days and reinstalling everything from scratch... This is my plan B if I can't find something better.

Thanks a lot for the ideas. I'll tell you how it goes.

Regards,