Can a HDD be partitioned after Vista is installed?

I recently installed Windows Vista Home Premium on a brand new 500Gb hard disk. I thought it should be easy but, as ever, I was too optimistic.

Whereas the older Windows XP installation procedure made a 'big deal' out of ensuring the host disk was properly partitioned and formatted, Vista did not, and I missed the opportunity for Vista to partition and format my hard disk.

Accordingly, Vista completed its install giving me no further opportunity to partition the host drive.

So, now I have a single local partition of 456 Gb formatted capacity with Windows Vista fully installed and almost lost in the available space.

Is there any way I could make an extended partition or two (or three) out of the present oversized local partition? Are there any freeware partitioning utilities available, for example? Alternatively does Vista have such a utility that could do the job?

I have a copy of DriveSpace but it's old and will only partition drives of up to 80 Gb capacity. That seemed quite a big drive then but not so now.

I'd rather not have to wipe the drive and re-install Vista, if I can avoid it.

You should be able to change the partition size with in vista without data loss,

To access Disk Management, right click on My Computer, and select Manage from the context menu – this will open the Computer Management console

From the Computer Management console, click on Disk Management which is located under the Storage section in the left hand pane. To shrink a current volume, locate the partition to be resized from the Disk Manager, right click on it, and from the context menu select Shrink Volume.

A Shrink dialog box will open from which you can enter the amount of space in MB to shrink the partition. This dialog box will also show the current size of the partition, the size of available shrink space available, and the total size after shrinking. Once you have selected the amount of space to shrink the partition by, click on the Shrink button.*Note: the size of the available shrink space can be restricted due to page files, restore files, and hibernation files.

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Thank you for yor response to my query about partitioning a hard disk following the installation of Windows Vista.

In the event there were so many problems I did a complete re-install of Vista, taking the opportunity to partition the 500 gb drive into four volumes, with Vista occupying the smallest at 75 Gb and the other three for my files. This allows me to occasionally reformat the Vista drive without affecting the data on the other drives.

In 20 years of computing I've never experienced anything like the trouble I've had with trying to get Vista set up. You would think it would have been easy with a new motherboard, 2Gb of branded ram and a clean HDD. Far from it! Wary of Vista's reputation I took things slowly and made sure that the rest of the system was right up to date and all software + drivers Vista certified etc.

After downloading 128 Mb of essential Vista updates from the Microsoft site, my copy of Vista became convinced it was pirated. I lost Windows Aero and all sorts of pop-ups kept interrupting my work. I tried to access help at the Microsoft site but they needed a Product ID (not the product key) to be given. After searching through Control Panel and so on I got the Product ID and typed it in, but the Help site said it wasn't valid and my enquiry was dropped.

The vendor of the software (Scan computers of Horwich) have declined to offer me any assistance, stating that activation issues are the sole preserve of Microsoft. So I'm going round in circles.

I had the temerity to try and install Nero 7 which came bundled with the new DVD writer. Vista said that there was a known issue with Nero 7 which could be corrected by downloading the update (330 mb) from the Nero site. This I did, the process locking up my PC for over two hours. When I started the update program it got so far and then simply disappeared from the screen - Vista had simply dropped it. To my amazement, when I looked in Windows Explorer, the file had disappeared too! I tried to reformat my Drive D volume with the older installation of Vista on it, but was told I could not do so - permission was denied (!!!!)

Who's in charge here? How can I convince Vista that it cannot delete files without my permission, or deny me the ability to reformat drives as I wish? How can I obtain help from Mirosoft before my 90 days free assistance expires?

The whole thing has been a battle royal. Help me to win this battle, please.