After advice here as part of my clean re-install I want to partition off the 2 HDD (identical WD 250GB)

Aiming to set a 50GB partition on each drive for 'active OS' and use other for backup of this for easy restore.

After a clean install of Viats 32 bit, I tried following VISTA partition tool.

For drive it comes up in the console as:
Total size before shrink 238146
Size of available shrink space 114650
Enter the ammount of sapce to shrink 1145650
Total size after shrink 123766

If I proceed it results in 120.87GB and 119.6GB

I cannot make primary partition smaller or new partition larger ?

I have turned off paging, deleted restore & shadow files, defraged ... no difference.

I even tried it on the empty 2nd HDD ... this also will not partition smaller than

How can I make this partition 'larger' and thus the primary partition 50GB

having just done a 3rd clean install this week - I hope I don't have to start again.


I'll put things on hold pending help