About partitions in Vista on an acer

I have question on partitions i am lost with the other 2 the one with 9.76 gb and the one with 3.25gb. Are those both needed? Or can i delete them both or only one. Also I wanted to dual boot my computer which i increased the memory for the c for vista and the data d decreased because i want to install windows xp pro. What is the best idea i should do keep it the same or should i do other changes to make it work good? Any recommendations on what i should do? Help appreciated.

 

First things first; that is a retarded set up that Acer gave you. It looks like only the ACER partition has any data on it at all, so they should be safe to delete; all except the EISA configured partition b/c its at the front. To be honest, I don't know what that means. You might be able to move the partition to the left using Gparted.

In any case, you can delete DATA and the 3.25GB one and then extend the DATA partition.

 

Thanks for the reply ya i just recently bought it and i wanna dual boot it with windows xp. I don't really understand partitions but i wanna reformat since it has alot of junk i don't need. Also if i have a reformat cd is it safe to delete that EISA partition later on? I also was confused since i am new to partitions what happens if you just delete them is the available for your other drives? Thank you for the quick responds i appreciated.

 

Well, it would be very difficult to get your drive back to one big partition; like I said, it would involve moving every single bit some distance to the left. For obvious reasons this is extremely time consuming and risky. If your recovery disc can do the same thing in an hour or two and you have no personal data on it, I would highly recommend that you use the recovery disc.

Also, a short tutorial on partitions; deleting a partition basically means that the hard disk space is there, but that no operating system can address it unless it is structured with a recognizable filesystem (ex, ext3 or reiserFS for Linux). For example, consider the following setup:

< Windows, NTFS > < Data, NTFS >

The Data partition is recognized and mounted by Windows as it uses Microsoft's NT filesystem (NTFS); but, if you were to delete the Data partition, it wouldn't be mounted and you would have to extend the filesystem spanning the Windows partition to "address" the deleted partition space.

In your case, in order to merge the DATA and 3.25GB partitions into the ACER partition to make one filesystem , you must delete DATA and the 3.25GB and then extend the NTFS filesystem on ACER to address the space given up by the deleted partitions.

 

Not necessarily. My partitions looked like the OP's. I made the recovery DVD's, then wiped the entire drive. Not exactly intentional; I didn't know what I was doing. After making a mess of things I used a GParted LiveCD to delete all partitions then set the entire HDD as NTFS, then re-loaded the two recovery DVD's. Ended up with one large C drive. Everything works except the little "gear" icon in the Acer Empowerment widget. Since I have the recovery DVD's I don't think it matters to me.

I'm not necessarily suggesting doing the same thing

Another member of this forum, Lster, wiped the entire drive, then used GParted LiveCD to create a partition and set that to NTFS. His recovery discs re-installed to just that partition, leaving the rest of the HDD free for Linux. Slick.

 

So than deleting those 2 partitions wouldnt matter. I mean personally i have the windows vista cd i just wanna dual boot xp to have 2 os systems thats why.

 

As long as you have the recovery discs you're "probably" OK to delete them. There are lots of posts on this forum regarding these confusing Acer partitions and I'd strongly suggest reading back thru them. I don't pretend to understand how they all work together yet...

 

I said that it would be difficult to get one single partition since he would have to move the Acer partition to the left, a time consuming and risky operation. Read my post in greater detail.

 

I just have 2 dual boots don't know if i will still do it i will see xD

 

bc -
I apologize if it sounded like I was challenging your knowledge. Just wanted to point out that there are almost always weird alternatives, even if they're not the smartest way to go.

 

No need to apologize; and btw, you're right. There are many ways to solve a problem.