Move VIsta

Here are all the steps to successfully perform a move : http://gparted.free.fr/screenshots/VIST … VISTA.html
Keep in mind, GParted is able to move your partition, but you NEED the vista cd-dvd to repair (ATM) Vista Boot Manager !

Hi!

Your partition table has a fixed size of four entries. The partition describes by the first entry will be /dev/sda1, the partition described by the second entry will be /dev/sdy2 and so on. When you received your computer, the first three entries were used, where sda1 was located at the beginning of the disk and sda3 was at the end of the drive.
GParted has cleared out the first and third entries, thus deleting the first and third partitions; however, it did not move the metadata describing your Vista boot partition to the first partition table entry. After the work I've done using GParted, this seems to be the normal behaviour - and it usually is not a problem; nearly any operating system (as far as I kniow, excemtions are DOS and the old DOS-based Windows versions) can cope with this. If you remember the good ols 100 MByte iomega Zip diskettes: These disks had a partition table, too, and they were partitioned with one partition spanning the whole diskette - which was described by the fourth partition table entry; the first three entries were always empty. No problem in this - you could use them anywhere, and you could boot off these diskettes as well...

I think the black screen could be because you deleted the first partition. It is well possible that the Windows boot loader does not rely on the partition table entry describing a partition, but on the total number of partitions on the drive (and on the position of the system partition in this list).
This would mean that originally, the boot loader searched for the Windows system files on the second partition; however, since you deleted all but one partition, there is no second partition any more after you were finished with GParted. Thus, the boot loader would just search empty space...
My suggestion is that you delete only the data partition and grow the Vista system partition to the end of the disk. THis way, you'll keep the partition numbering intact, and you'll keep the recovery partition as well - deleting this partition can (depending on the manufacturer's conditions) even void your computer's warranty!

Hi!

Exactly: You have only obne partiton on your drive, but this partition is defined by the second partition table entry.

Yes, you're right - if the Vista boot loader looks at the partition table entry that definesy the Vista partition.
However, if the boot loader does not take care about the entries defining each partitioon, but simply counts the partitions (from the beginning of the diek to the end), then the partition numbers would change (before deleting the recovery partition, the Vista partition is the second partition on the drive; after deleting, there's no partition before the Vista partition anymore, so it is the first partition).
I don't know exactly how the Vista boot loader works (and I'm not interested in buying Vista just to check this ;-) ) - so the only thing I can suggest right now is to try again - but this time, leave the recovery partition in its place!

OK. Please keep in mind that Linux usually needs at least two partitions - one as installation target, one as swap space (Windows uses a file - usually on its system partition - as swap space; Linux uses a separate partition for this purpose). In theory, both partitions may be either primary or logical; however, you usually can avoid some problems when the Linux system partition is a primary partition.
Also, think about the file system you want to use on your shared data partition - Windows can not access the typical Linux file systems (although there are drivers fior ext2/ext3 available), and Linux' NTFS suport is based on reverse engineering. So you best format the shared data partition as FAT32 (it may be either a primary or a logical partition).

Hi!

... or move Vista towards the end of the drive, expand the recovery partition, reformat it as ext3 or whatever you want to use on yoer Linux root FS - and install Linux there. Since you want to use Linux most of the time, this could make sense since a hard drive typically reaches the highest transfer rates (and shortest seek times) at the beginning of the disk - so you would get maximum performance on your root filesystem.
However, the disadvantage would be that then the swap partition would likely be located behind the Vista partition (otherwise you'd change the partition order on disk again, perhaps jamming the Vista boot loader), so if your system needs to swap a lot, the heads would have to "jump" over the Vista partition all the time.

Another point would be that using this partition layout, you could get along using only primary partitions - which are far more resistent against drive erriors since thze metadata describing a primary partition is stored in a well-defined place on the hard drive. For the first logical partition, the position of this metadata is (in principle) determined by the partition table in the MBR, for the second logical partition, the first one determines tha place of metadata storage, for the third logical partition it's the second and so on. Thus, yopur logical partitions form a chain across your drive - break the chain at one place (hard drive or software error), and you'll lose not only the logical partition directly affected by the error, but also all your logical partitions behind this one.
This does not mean that using logical partitions in practice is insecure or risky - but by avoiding logical partitions, you can reduce the (minimal) risk of partiton damage even further by reducing the number of hard drive sectors your partitions depend on.

I'm using ext2fsd ( http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ ) on my "playground" machine to access the Linux partition from Windows 2000. I didn't stumble across any problems right now, but you should know that I only use this driver for read-only access - I have a FAT32 partition as a common storage area on this machine, and so I can put data that should go to the Linux partition there and copy it the next time I run Linux.
If I understood everything right, journalling is not implemented yet - the driver reads the journal and replays it if the filesystem is found to be unclean, but during operation it does not write to the journal, so if your Windows crashes, you'll have to run a time-consuming e2fsck on the Linux partition.

I'd like to remind that this section is related to the GParted development and testing. There is a special parted for support issues. It is easier to find them after, by searching the specific section only.

Unfortunately, I can move the entire thread but not  just some posts.