I need to shrink my C drive to allow me to install vista Now i have 55 gigs of free space to install Vista but the DISKPART Shrink tool only reports 10MB available but correctly reports the 80 Gig hard drive why doesnt Vista see the free space G was here.

? MS diskpart? It does not support any operation on an installed OS partition nor does it support shrinking an existing partition. see here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/... You need Partition Magic or other 3rd party partition program. Understand no 3rd party or any party for that matter supports any operation on dynamic disks last I researched. I think you are also confusing free space with available space. Free space usually refers to space available on the existing partition. Available space is space that is not allocated to a partition and is available to then create a partition. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search

Oh that Diskpart of yesteryears. I still remember it was a very useful tool when bigger hard drive was a very expensive or nonexistent commodity. i_Xp/VistaUser

You need any third-party partitioning software actually. i use Disk Director for it. But shrinking the system partition is a tricky deal, so you'd better back up data from this partition.