Resize OS partition?

mordeith

Apologies if this has been asked before, but is there any way I can enlarge my C: partition without having to reinstall XP? (I only made it 2GB in size and now I'm paying for my shortsightedness )

ianmc38

Partition Magic

http://www.soft32.com/download_151.html

Capt'n Midnight

partition magic Price: 69.95$ (and I've lost data using it in the past YMMV)

OR

download a knoppix cd and use qtparted on the CD - does NTFS partitions too.

Actually if it's NTFS you can expand that in drive manager in windows already but there is pain of basic/dynamic/pro/home etc.

Backup the drive using NtBackup first to a file on another drive - this is your get out of jail card if anything goes pear shapped.

mordeith

Cap Midnight. What do you mean about it being a pain to do it Windows. The drive is NTFS but I didn't come across any option to expand it. I was looking under disk management. Do you mean somewhere else?

Tobias Greeshman

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

partition magic Price: 69.95$ (and I've lost data using it in the past YMMV)

I've used in countless amounts of times and never had any problems, even moved partitions successfully. Did you forget to defrag the driver by any chance?

SolarNexus

silas wrote:

I've used in countless amounts of times and never had any problems, even moved partitions successfully. Did you forget to defrag the driver by any chance?

its a great proggie, but if you ask it to do too much, or if your hard drive is too big / too full, it can and does fail, leaving your hdd in a mess.

mordeith

I just need it this once so will the trial version work or has it a lot of functions disabled?

Clinical Waste

Or use this:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

Its free and very useful.

ianmc38

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

partition magic Price: 69.95$ (and I've lost data using it in the past YMMV)

Used it for years on large drives (500GB+) and never once had problems with properly maintained drives.

dango

With a brand new drive, less than a day old - partition magic wiped 150 gigs. It's not perfect. Make backups or use other methods. Well, make backups anyway.

mordeith

The only data on the hardrive at the moment is the actual OS. I must admit I've never done a back up in my life. Been lucky so far I guess. :rolleyes: So if I back up the OS partition will that back up the actual OS as well (so if something does go wrong I won't have to reinstall).

jor el

If you use something like Norton ghost to create an image of your OS partition to a DVD or other source, then that can be restored in the event of something going wrong. I'm sure there are other tools that will do the same but I don't know of any off hand.

If it's the OS disk you want to backup then copying it to another location and then back again afterwards will leave it un-bootable. You won't be able to copy everything, hence the need for an image to be created with Ghost or similar software.

If you're going to use any tool to resize a partition, then it can go wrong. If you do this without backing up the data first then you will loose everything if it does go wrong.

Simplest thing to do would be copy everything of value from your main disk to another location. Then wipe the partition table of the source disk and re-partition and format in the way you want it. Then re-install the OS and copy back all the files you took off it in the first place. This means no messing with Partition magic or Ghost, and no loss of data (unless the backup drive happens to die before you restore to the first disk, but this is very unlikely).

Since this is a one off event, this is probably your best approach.

SwampThing

mordeith wrote:

Apologies if this has been asked before, but is there any way I can enlarge my C: partition without having to reinstall XP? (I only made it 2GB in size and now I'm paying for my shortsightedness )

Do you have another hdd - internal or external - to put an image of your drive on? Not another partiton on the same disk, but another physical disk.

Are you trying to enlarge C: and shrink another partition or are you trying to make C: the full size of the disk?

humaxf1

Use Acronis partitioning...much better than partition magic if you ask me. Have used it several times and works like a dream

SwampThing

humaxf1 wrote:

Use Acronis partitioning...much better than partition magic if you ask me. Have used it several times and works like a dream

Sure, for disk/partition images, but how do you resize an active partition with Acronis? That's why I asked about another disk - to hold the image - and then just resize the existing drive as needed.

edit - Sorry - disk director suite - my bad

mordeith

SwampThing wrote:

Are you trying to enlarge C: and shrink another partition

Exactly what I'm trying to do.

SwampThing

Well, then you need Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director Suite or something like that.

Tobias Greeshman

mordeith wrote:

I just need it this once so will the trial version work or has it a lot of functions disabled?

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Paragon-Partition-Manager.shtml

Limitations:

All operations are available in virtual mode only - so you can evaluate how the program looks like and how it represents your partition configuration, try to perform operations virtually and feel how you can change partition configuration with Partition Manager. Also, following components are not included to reduce demo version size:
- BootManager
- Complete help file (available as separate download here)
- Partition Explorer
- ISO Burner
- Bootable Recovery CD

dalk

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

partition magic Price: 69.95$ (and I've lost data using it in the past YMMV)

I've used Partition Magic for years and i've had one fail when resizing a partition. And it was a properly maintained disk etc. So it can happen in my experience (and Capt'n Midnights), though i would descibe it as rare.

Having said that, it goes without saying that you backup anything that you do not want to loose before doing any kind of disk work!

Capt'n Midnight

To extend a basic volume
Open Command Prompt.
Type:
diskpart

At the DISKPART prompt, type:
list volume

Make note of the number of the basic volume you want to extend.

At the DISKPART prompt, type:
select volume n

Selects the basic volume, n, you want to extend into contiguous, empty space on the same disk.

At the DISKPART prompt, type:
extend [size=n]

Extends the selected volume by size=n megabytes (MB).

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkb_cnc_efsx.asp