In need of Partition assistance.

[WiizerFanboy]

All right, so we all know Vista has it's little nags and annoyances. I have a problem with the added in "Disk Manager" utility. I'm trying to shrink my current 298 GB (Entire HDD size) Vista partition so I end up with about 10 GB unallocated space. I want to format the unallocated space into an NTFS primary volume so I can install XP on it, and then change the Vista partition into a FAT32 volume so I can keep all my non-OS data in there. I have two problems:

1.) I want to change the vista partition into FAT32 without losing any data, I'm assuming that's impossible? Alternatively, I can shrink the 298 volume into 188 GB of unallocated space, format it to an FAT32 extension partition, and move all my non-OS data from the NTFS into that. Would that be a better approach?

2.) The vista disk manager limits my shrink size to 1957 MB for whatever reason. (Diskpart.exe does this also)



The thing is, For the time being, I disabled the paging file, and I have no idea what a snapshot is. I understand that fragmented files can also be the cause of restricting shrink size, but defragmenting didn't solve it either. I'm out of ideas. Can anyone help?

I would dual boot but setting up a dual boot between Vista and XP is overly complicated. since my laptop's HDD is SATA, I would have to slipstream SATA drivers onto my XP CD and fiddle with all sorts of drivers and Bios settings that would just add to my frustration.