Partition Troubles

[G_G]

Okay, I'm dual booting two os's right now. Win 7 and Vista. I've been doing it for awhile now with no troubles but I'm running out of disk space. The reason I've kept the vista partition is for files on it that I needed.
Well after backing those files up I wanted to format it. But it won't format it because its the Primary, Active partition.

Now I've tried doing this before and it fucked everything up. I went into the vista os and made my win 7 the primary. However when I re-booted it said the NSDR file is missing. Or something like that. So at that point I had to wipe everything, re-install vista from my CD. Then decided to get windows 7 again. Decided to backup those files I needed again, and here I am wanting to format C: but can't.

My question is, how do I make the D: drive (one I'm on) the primary active partion without messing everything up. I've done some googling but haven't found the answer I needed. Really all I want is to format the C: drive for my extra 100 gigs of space back. Thanks in advance!

[WhiteRose]

I had some similar partition troubles a while back. Have you tried using an alternate partition manager? The Vista/7 partition manager does its job well, but occasionally runs into trouble. I eventually got it to work by using GParted, which is very very slow with NTFS file systems, but it gets the job done.

[Fantasist]

I'm no expert on this, but let me put this out there.
If I could completely reconfigure the partitions in Windows 7 install process (like in XP install process where you get to delete all partitions and create new ones), I would do that. Just backup the data, erase all the partitions and do a fresh install.

Regarding how you want to partition your drives, here's what I usually do.
Give about 40GB for the primary OS (Win7 in my case), and partition the remaining space however you want. Use the small primary partition ONLY for the OS and always store all your files on the other partitions. That way, you can reinstall the OS any number of times without worrying much about data loss.

The advantage with this is that the other 'data' partitions can be re-sized (there ARE limitations you need to look out for, but it can be done). For example, when I later decided to install Ubuntu alongside 7, I re-sized one of my data partitions. Made 200GB into 160GB and 40GB of unpartitioned space, where I installed Ubuntu.