Can I change the partition size without formating

in the disk managment window. the option to extend the D:/ or C:/ is disable. I only can shrink them. If i do then the part I shrink I can't make it partition I get a message says that I don't have enough space even though it will be 20 GB..
any idea how I can go around this??
thx

 

Partition Magic is your friend here, but it's not free.

 

I think I should be able to do it ,It seems possible to do from the disk management but I still can't figure it out.. no need to other programs..

 

Nope, not possible to do from Disk Management. Heard Partition Magic works but its not compatible with Vista...

 

thanks guys I just found an older thread about same problem. It seems that it can't be done with the disk mangement.

 

Partition Magic will screw you over.
Good thing i had nothing on mine when i did it.. plus i wanted a fresh install anyways. acronis disk director suite 10 is your savior.

 

gparted will resize partitions and it's free... and you can burn a LiveCD and boot it off that, so it doesn't matter what OS you have installed.

 

I second this. I already used Acronis Disk director to delete and merge my recovery partition to the primary partition. Partition magic used to be a good application until Symantec bought them out.. and destroyed and broke that application.. much like they killed Norton and everything else they touched. The only thing they do right is the Symantec removal tool that cleans out all symantec files of the PC.

 

Another vote for Acronis Disk Director.

 

Check it out here http://maxt.dk/search/hiren's/

 

Its worked great with xp but I heard that it screws up with Vista? I need to resize on Vista and was a bit reluctant to try it.

 

Gparted is OS independent as it boots off a live cd and does its job.... I hardly doubt how a partition operation done by gparted will work fine with Xp and not with Vista as only the disk partition structure changes....

I've been using both Acronis as well as gparted and both are indeed quite good..... Partition Magic works fine with FAT32 and ext2/3 partitions but I think it has some problems with NTFS from what I've come across...

 

So which way did you use? I want to combine the recovery partition with the primary OS partition without formating the whole harddrive.

 

I used gParted together with native Vista disk management. The dells come with 4 primary partitions and you cannot create another. When you shrink a partition (eg C) the empty space ends up being after C (physically) and Vista can't expand D to soak it up unless it's adjacent to it. So I used Gparted to move the unallocated space next to D and then used Vista disk management to expand D to soak up the unallocated space. There may be an easier way but I couldn't figure it out.

So now all my data is stored on D:\data (which is mapped to X: ) .

 

THANK YOU!!! i just used that image and resized my partitions with archonos and it worked great!