[capuccino]

I have had a dream of dual-booting for some time because I hate Vista and my laptop probably isn't powerful enough to run it (but it came with it, so what could I do?). According to some instructions I found on the net, I tried to shrink a partition in Windows Vista Disk Management. So I left it to shrink...and seeing it was taking some time, I went away...

...for two hours. When I came back, my comp had frozen. No kidding - hard drive light was offr, Ctrl/Alt/Del was unresponsive, hitting Capslock did nothing...so I powered it off and turned it back on.

BEFORE I attempted to shrink the C-drive, it was 86gb, of which 51gb was used. It told me I could shrink the partition to 73gb, leaving 13gb of unallocated space (to be used for my linux stuff)

NOW when I'm in disk management, it still tells me the disk is 86gb big. BUT when I right-click and get the properties of the C-drive, it tells me it's 73gb big, with 51gb used.

Obviously it's not able to shrink anymore, so I'm stuck. I imagine something has gone very wrong with Windows, but because I'm useless I have no idea how to go about fixing it. I'm suspecting I may have to format everything and reinstall Windows again (if that's the case, it's no big deal since I expectedmore to go wrong and backed up all my important files to an external hard drive...it's just a nuisance...)

[unbidden]

Boot with the windows or linux disk and see if you can view the missing upartitioned space. If so, create a partition using said space.

I suggest you backup the current Windows drive and or critical data; make a copy of the bcd file (START - Search - bcdedit).