Fixing boot/shrinking Vista pre-install

[weston3]

I have a T60 with Vista pre-install. I want to set up multi-booting with Linux and OSX. Two issues:

Startup Repair: If boot is screwed up I get a Windows Boot Manager screen asking for the DVD to get to Startup Repair. Lenovo offers no such utility. Has anyone found a way to do the repair? The only alternative seems to be a complete reformat and install from scratch. Would any of the old beta versions of Vista be useful here?

Resizing the Vista partition: My Vista partition tool will only shrink the partition to 75gb (from 113) - even after defrag with several utilities, there are files 'left' that seem to limit the shrink process. Any way to move them and shrink down to 35gb or so? I have also tried using gparted, (used by Ubuntu and Mepis to partition drives), but it also corrupted the boot process .

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[SHoTTa35]

as for the shrinking just use partition magic and that'll take care of it.

For the boot manager, i think they old discs should be able to fix that or just get a copy from someone even if you can't install with it at least you can fix it.

[makaveli559m]

If a partition is compressed that might be waht is causing the problem.

[weston3]

I haven't yet finished a download of Vista from bittorrent, but I DID discover two things:

For partitioning: I used gparted livecd with ntfsresize to resize the file system, then fdisk to shrink the partition. This made Vista unbootable. BUT

When using Rescue and Restore =>restore hard disk to factory=>custom, it discovered more than one partition and prompted to restore only to C:. Then it aborted and when rebooting, did a chkdsk on C: . Much to my surprise, that fixed the Vista boot!

Don't know if this can be duplicated, but it sure helped me!