Ted
Vista comes with its own disk management. Go into the control panel and click Admin Tools and then Computer Management. Under Storage look at Disk Management and there you "see" the disk layout. You can grab the end of the partition which Vista is on and then make it smaller by dragging it to the left. ( names from XP but IIRC its the same on Vista )
This IMHO is the best bit of Vista !!!!! :)
Looking at the sizes of the partitions I would recon that sda1 has the utilities to reformat the drive and install the drivers, etc sda2 has the compressed image of Vista to "reinstall" or "factory reset" sda3 is vista ( as you said )
I would copy sda2 to DVD and this will allow you to manually re-install Vista when M$ is getting tired.
Ubuntu v7.something Feisty Fawn will read but not write ( as default ) the NTFS partition. I would recommend copying the boot sector of sda to a safe location ( even floppy ) as Vista is a bitch to get the boot sector back if something goes very wrong. My Dell came with the partition but no backup disks, but I eventually got some disks through the post.
I have not used GenToo, so I'm not replying to the other email chain. I've used loads of *nix ( SunOS, Solaris 2.4 to 9, RedHat 4.2 to RH9, PuppyLinux, DSL and Ubuntu ) and helped with others. I'm happy when I can run FireFox, have a CLI and no bloatware, where I think RH has now gone.
Just finished upgrading my dual-boot laptops disk. I used a Ghost 2003 booting CD to copy the NTFS partition to a USB drive (320G) and then partition the new drive and copy the partition back, going from 30G to 60G and then install FF and alter grub to boot both OS's. NOTE: after FF upgrades over the internet it looses the M$ entry so make a backup of the changes under /boot/grub. NOTE2: do grub-install /dev/hda NOT on a partition.
HTH Keith