I have a HP pavillion dv9000 laptop running windows vista home premium and am trying to configure a dual-boot with ubuntu 7.10. I know that i have to create a boot partition on my hard drive but the vista partition manager said that i could only shrink the windows partition of my 160 gig hard drive ( of which nearly 70 gigs is free ) down 1 gig. I then tried using a command line partition manager which told me the same thing. I have also tried a number of 3rd party live cd partition managers but they said my hard drive was not registered.
I know its possible ( and usually easy ) to do because a friend who also has vista used the included partition utility to create a 40 gig partition and successfully installed ubuntu with no problems. I believe the problem may lie in the fact that i have an included HP recovery partition but i cannot delete it because doing so would clear my entire hd.
Anything would be a big help at this point.
Vista Hard Drive Partition Problems 
Linear Mode
