need help on hdd partioning of dell studio

Hello dell studio uses,

I have 250 HDD on my dell studio.I am going to get in few days.I heard like by default dell people partition like

C drive which has OS(Vista) + remaining space
D drive for the recovery.

Can i reformat like 50 GB for OS other for my own data drive. and also with out loosing recovery drive.

Dell users Please help me out how to do in detailed steps if you already experienced on this.

 

Yes you can use GParted for that. Let me get it right. You want 50GB for your own stuff, apart from the space allocated for the OS and recovery.
In GParted, just take out 50GB as unallocated space, and make a partition on it. You can have a look at the documentation ( resizing partitions), it's pretty straightforward.

 

thats is an 3rd party tool partitioning can not we like re format the hd like how w e need partitions and installing the os in one drive and remaining drives for data with out loosing recovery drive which is provide by the dell

 

Ok, you can assign partitions when installing vista. Have a look at this guide, it'll tell you how to partition the drive during the vista install.

 

Hmm. Dell usually ships with 4 partitions made already in the OS, the maximum allowed. You cannot just start resizing without getting rid of some of the existing partitions. I am not sure what the smaller ones are for (like a 36 mb fat partition). Might want to look into that before you start manipulating your set up.

 

When I get my Studio 15 (hopefully soon), will I be able to reduce the Windows partition to, say, 50Gb, and create another partition for all my data, without losing the files already on the HDD and having to reinstall?

 

My Studio 15 Vista home 250G HD shipped with 3 partitions.

1 hidden 118MB
2 d: recovery 10GB
3 c: os 220+GB

If all you want is another partition for data :-

Leave partitions 1 & 2 alone unless you know what you are doing.
In Vista Computer management -> Disk management -> right click c: -> Shrink

Note that if you stuff your partitions, but 1 & 2 are intact
d:\dell\image\factory.wim is the factory image file and can be restored using Microsofts imagex.exe on a boot cd such as winPE or Barts boot disk. You can also burn this to DVD for backup.

 

Not true. You can have up to 128 partitions - ... But only 4 Primary partitions per disk (primary partitions are BIOS bootable). You can have as many logical partitions as you want.. simply put them on an extended partiton. I have 6 partitions on my 250gb drive. 4 primary 2 logical.

Sure you can. You don't need to delete any partitions to resize (shrink) existing ones. Enlarging partitions are of course restricted by the available space left on the drive.

I believe Dell uses the first partition which may be FAT32 on some systems, or custom EISA on others to stick it's recovery loader & allow the OS to put it's master boot records there. I also do this with my homebuilt workstations - it's keeps thing nice and tidy.