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The backup wouldn't be a bootable one, most likely, and if would require you to revet the licence through Microsoft.

If you're not using Vista, you should just delete it. You won't lose your license by deleting it. Then you can expand your OS X partition to the full size of your hard drive.

sturner wrote:

There are programs that purport to resizing partitions on the fly. To my mind that is dicey. Most of the time you have to delete a partition and reinstall it. When you do that, it is often advantageous to do a clean install.

The boot camp partition can't be resized on the fly, but I may be mistaken. You don't lose the license. You do have the install disk don't you? IF you don't, then you do have a problem.

It's not dicey... it's a fairly safe operation to do, because all you're doing is changing where the partition/filesystem thinks it ends (yes, it's more complex than that).

The issue here with resizing Vista, is that you won't be able to expand the OS X partition after shrinking the Vista partition, because all you're doing is moving the Vista partition's endpoint. The other issue is that OS X's Disk Utility is the only application that can partition the Boot Camp partitions, because it uses a smurfed up hybrid MBR/GPT partition type. And it can't resize NTFS, which Vista requires.

So yes, you're absolutely right about not being able to resize the Boot Camp partition.

gd, what it comes down to is:

Booksley wrote:

If you're not using Vista, you should just delete it.

naw,, you can trust me. I'm always pessimistic regarding Winders. Prepare for the worst. You won't be unpleasantly surprised if it does occur.

Best practices and what rabbits I can manage to extract from hats these days often differ. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.