You can give a shot to PartedMagic. It's a linux livecd for the sole purpose of partition manipulation.



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I have used it to manipulate HDD with WinXP NTFS partitions without issues. As long as you do not resize your Vista partition, I think it should work fine with Vista too.



BTW, my understanding is that you don't 3rd party software to resize Vista partitions. The below were steps i found quite some time ago on the net for resizing Vista partitions



1>Click on the Start menu

2>Right click on Computer and click on Manage

3>In left pane, open Storage category and click on Disk

Management

4>Now Right click on the partition you'd like to modify.

5>Click on Extend Volume or Shrink Volume to extend or

shrink the selected partition to desired size

I have no issues doing resizing etc.



The thing is that somehow, someway the partition table (which has account of all the sectors, geometry information about all the partitions on the drive) has got somewhat corrupted.



I know of linux sfdisk command, which allows manual editing of the partition table and mbr. But, I rather not experiment with that. I want to use an easier tool.



this looks good : DiskPatch User Guide

Try Testdisk.. Certainly handy and useful software .. I have recovered the table a lot of times

Acronis disk director (comes with partition recovery) . One of best one's i have ever used . For data recovery only, use r-tools.

Use PTDD software

Ok thanks guys, I tinkered with manual editing the PT for the last few days and got my data back.



Lots of maths involved