Resizing partitions in Vista Prem.

Hi guys,

Just got my new I6400 last week and playing with Vista. I have a 160GB HD and want to resize C: (OS) from 136GB to lets say half that and then resize the 10GB D: (RECOVERY) to add the remaining resized space from C:

Is there anyway I can do this without wiping my C: OS drive? I've already tried the shrink tool in Disk Mgmt. but it doesn't let me extend the D: drive after shrinking C: to around 80GB.

Any help would be welcome.

 

Greetings - You won't be able to resize the recovery partition - as you have noticed - because of where its located on the drive - and you would not want to add regular data to the recovery partition anyway (recovery partition is not NTFS if I remember correctly - I'm on an XP machine now). What I did was just create a new partition - which in your case will probably be F: (your cdrom/dvd is prolly the E: drive anyway) and you safely put your file data there. I'm glad I saw this post - no one had answered my post about the WXGA+ on the e1505/6400 - is it bright enough - do you like it?? Good luck...

 

I ran into the same problem with vista.... not being able to resize my existing partitiions.....

So how can you reduce say the C partition by one half and create a new partition in vista?? Can you do it thru disk management or do you need some software like partition magic or watever?? As far as I remember when I tried to use disk management it gave me a weird error like "not enough disk space" or something like that

 

Wella - I recommend that you use the shrink functionality through Disk Management - then after the shrink, right click on new unallocated space in Disk Mgt and pick new partition & it will open a wizard. Click through the wizard and it will default to the next available drive letter. It does not default to Quick Format - so make sure you select that towards the end of the wizard - otherwise the format will run for some time. I've done it my HP dv2000t and with my HP 1710 desktop with zero problems. Vista is very friendly in this regard compared to XP.

 

A simple answer: You can only expand to the right in Viska Disk Management. If the free space is to the left, you cannot use it to expand.

One soultion: Ghost (or other backup tool) the drive you want to expand. Delete the partition. You should now have a BIG free space. Make the new partition there of the size you want. Restore your image to that partition.

 

JellyGeo I actually tried to do that but no dice... keeps giving me the not enough disk space error... hmm weird...

gohanssjn - what do you mean by "expand to the right"? didn't quite get that....

 

Hmm.. okay, I guess I should restore the image of D: drive I took before I wiped the partition out and recreated it. Hopefully I didn't do too much damage there. I didn't touch the 54MB hidden utility partition or the 2GB Mediadirect hidden partition either.

I tried to shrink the C: drive down and create a new simple partition using the unallocated free space. It said that I did not have enough free space to complete the action and just stopped. I tried calling Dell and MS regarding the issue. Dell didn't know how to do it, and MS wanted to charge me.. so I gave up there.

Btw, the Truelife screen is plenty bright enough for me. I have to turn it down at times because it is too bright for me sometimes. Screen is very clear and images show up very crisp. Video is pretty good, and no choppiness/jaggies as far as I can see. Will test it out more as time goes by.

Thanks for the response.

 

ditto.. same here.. also Partitionmagic is NOT Vista compatible .. yet. Don't use it.. otherwise you'll risk frying your partitions/ OS.

As far as I've researched.. this is the best software to do what we want. However, I don't know if I'm ready to shell out the cash for this sw after I just spent so much on this laptop. And the free trial only allows creating a small 6GB partition or something rediculous.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

Ok, if I were to do this.. would I have to ghost, then delete the C: (OS) drive and D: (RECOVERY) partitions and then recreate my parititions the way I want and then restore the C: and D: images?

And by doing this, wouldn't Vista's boot manager / partition tables get screwed up?

 

Ok, what I mean is this. In Disk Manager, say you have two partitions:

|C|D|

And you delete space from C. You now have:

|C|Free space|D|

You can expand C into the free space because it is on the right side of C. But it is to the left of D, and therefore D cannot be expanded into that space.

Basically, you can add space to the end of a partition, but cannot alter the begining of the partition. Sorry if it was confusing before.

 

You would not have to format C:.

Ghost what partitions, aside from C:, that you want to keep.
Delete the partition(s) you Ghosted.
Shrink C: to what size you want.
Then make new partition(s), never touching C: again.
Then restore your Ghost to that/ those partition(s).

I have done this many times and never had the MBR get too screwy. If it did, I just told Vista to fix it and it did, just fine. If it happens to mess something up, boot the Vista CD, chose repair, it will tell you the startup sequence may be wrong (referring to the MBR), and it will fix just that.

 

got ya..... so basically this means that after you shrink C, the only thiing you can do with the unallocated space is to merge it back into C ------ which defeats the whole purpose of partitioning the C drive in the first place

So it seems to me that I can't partition my 160 gb C drive for now.... since the ghosting the drive and doing all that crazy format and partition thing just seems to be problematic....... I was hoping that there'd be an easier way to simply create a new partition but that's too bad... I guess we'll have to wait for partition magic to release a patch for vista....

cheers