1 Topic by sheffield12

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Topic: Gparted and Vista

I have a new computer wiith Vista Home OS and a 500GB HD with Sata 300 interface, on booting up from the Gparted CD I can get the main screen but at the bottom it says 'No devices detected'. only Gparted and Help are highlighted on menu bar at top every thing else is 'greyed out'. Graphics are Nvida Geoforce 8600GS but I have to select generic option [first in the list] to get this far - it will not work with Nvida.

I used Gparted on previous m/c with XP no problem- any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you for reading this.

2 Reply by class413

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Did you try to run using the Force VESA option?
(I guess you used the livecd).

/Moved to the live media section./

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by sheffield12

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Yes I did use the livecd. Can you talk me through how to use the Force Vesa option please

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Gparted and Vista

You boot the livecd, and select the "VESA" option from the initial menu, moving the selection bar by the "down arrow" key.
This option works in most cases.
You can try all options too, to find which of them is best for your system.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

5 Reply by sheffield12

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Sorry i think we are at cross purposes. I can get gparted to boot OK>languge>keymap>live cd driver, VESA.display depth>XRes but after this I get the main screen with the blue bar darting across the bottom-selecting devices it then stops and says no devices detected, this is the bit that stumps me.

6 Reply by class413

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Re: Gparted and Vista

I read again above:
You have vista. Then you can use vista own resizer, to shrink ntfs. It seems to be easier and perhaps safer.

"Sata 300 interface"
I hope you mean 3000gbit/s SATA, not any eventual SATA-3.
SATA and SATA-II drives are normally supported.

It seems that there is not a video problem. You could try to change some option on the BIOS (in some computers, bios can show a SATA hard drive as IDE) and turn it back to the previous setting after GParted work.

Another idea is to try the Sysresccd  livecd,
(sysresccd.org) that contains Gparted but with other boot system.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

7 Reply by sheffield12

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Sorry about not coming back to you sooner but I am no nearer resolving this issue. Basically the problem is this I have a new computer with a 500GB HD the HD is already partitioned into C and D with D containing the recovery software. When I started the C drive was about 400GB and I wanted to reduce this to contain just the Vista OS and form another partition, which is when I tried to use gparted, which would not work. I have read hundreds of posts on Vista website forums and used Vista own 'Volume Shrink' program but this only marginally reduces the size of the HD, I was advise to close down system restore which then allowed another marginal shrink of the HD. Following this someone mentioned a utility within Vista calle diskpart.exe which is a command prompt program for reducing the size of the HD, I ran this and it allowed me to reduce the size of the HD by about 100GB maximum so after all this I am left with a C drive of about 240Gb with 36GB space used! Try as I may I can't reduce this any further. The reason for reducing the C drive was to utiise it  soley the OS, and to take an image for restoration purposes with all my installed software including my Company server details. I found a copy of Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 SE on a disk given away with PC Answers, on installing this it does give the option to copy only the data on the C drive rather than the whole drive so I have made an image of the instaled software , which gets round one problem but I am still stuck with a 240GB drive I can't reduce any further!. I downloaded the iso image of sysresccd live as suggested and burnt this to a CD but I can't get it to boot [yes the PC is programmed to boot from CD/DVD first]. From all that I have read on the Vista forums this is a common problem that no-one has come up with a solution for [to the best of my knowledge] yet! I think I am going to give up and live with i! Sorry about the length of this post but at least you are aware of the whole story. Thank you for your suggestions.

8 Reply by class413

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Well, I think that the vista tools would never make the partition as small as 40 GiB...

Some further ideas:

- deactivate the virtual memory (swap function). It creates a big file, often located at a fixed position. Run the chkdsk command with the /f option, from the command line. Run the defrag utility.

- deactivate other programs like disk utilities etc. (I remember once an online disk compressing program locked the last sector of the partition, so the solution was to uninstall this utility, resize the partition, and reinstall it after).

Another livecd that contains Gparted is "parted-magic".

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

9 Reply by sheffield12

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Thank you class413 Moderator, downloaded parted-magic and it worked, Now got C [boot] drive down to 50GB, so after two weeks of frustration - success! Thank you one again.

10 Reply by class413

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Re: Gparted and Vista

Good!
Take care to not overload that system partition, keep at least 15% free.  Otherwise you can slow down the system.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

11 Reply by Digital8Doug (edited by Digital8Doug 2008-04-02 20:21:41)

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Re: Gparted and Vista

With Vista I would try for more like 25% in my past 2 years of bad experiences. Must leave sufficient room for bloated upgrades!

class413 wrote:

Good! Take care to not overload that system partition, keep at least 15% free.  Otherwise you can slow down the system.

Are any of you using Ready Boost?*? {* RSVP via e-mail *}

I shrank my C part by using 3rd party defrag tools {defraggler from makers of Ccleaner [crap cleaner] &/or JkDefrag} NOT the includedVista version!. My methods worked OK, was fairly quick!

Am thinking of shifting to a 200 GB, 16MB cache, Sata 3.0 Gbs, 7200 Seagate for my notebook. Will pay particular attention to any Sata 3.0 difficulties. This THREAD & above posts are excellent for novice & experienced views!

btw, M$ (XP & Vista) calls it Page File. Most defrag tools place the Virtual memory block AT the BACK end of the partition, thus problems on resizing, shrinking if not using proprietary versions!

Heed Class.. recommendation to turn it off;  whenever performing disk management / maintenance opertions

Also after most partition changes it now appears Vista likes to run chkdsk each time automatically.