Assuming it's running Vista, you'll need a new utility. Partition Magic is one, and Acronis Disc Director another. There are others as well.

thanks for the replies. Acronis really destroyed a previous computer, requiring three days of tech support to finally restore everything, that is, Reinstallation of WINXP and total loss of all data etc, so Acronis is not an option. In another thread or forum there is mention of the partitioning ability built into Vista itself, and that Partition Magic only "messes things up". I'm going to look into "Gparted."

Partition Magic and GParted are similar, so you probably won't find that one works and the other doesn't.

The vast majority of problems with Partition Magic can be traced to users who try to install it and run it from within Windows. It's really a DOS program, and when run from a DOS boot disk or from the PM CD, version 8 has a reliable track record. Trying to change a partition you are actively booted into is less reliable.

However, Microsoft ignores the partitioning rules when it comes to Vista.

Since the dawn of time ... well, since 1981 when the PC era began ... partitions have always been sized in units of whole cylinders. That means partitions always begin and end on cylinder boundaries. (Ever notice how you can't always get a partition of an exact size? It ends up rounding up or down to the nearest cylinder boundary.)

Vista, however, blithely ignores the industry standard and may create partitions that begin or end in the middle of a cylinder. Partition Magic and other tools that follow the rules will have trouble with such a partition layout.

Note it's not necessarily that the operating system is incompatible, it seems to be the non-standard partition layout that is the problem. If your disk uses an industry-standard partition layout, Partition Magic should work (especially if used from DOS). Otherwise, you could have trouble.

Vista systems that are upgraded from previous XP (or earlier) systems will often use a conventional partition layout. I've noticed many Dell systems that come with Vista preinstalled seem to use unconventional partitioning.