Repartitioning a laptop?s hard drive

I hope this is in the right forum section.

I’m going to buy a laptop pretty soon (it’s an asus gaming laptop), and I have a question about partitioning the hard drive. Based on reviews on the laptop I want to buy, it seems like the hard drive (which is 320 GB), comes partitioned in half, so there are 2 different drives that are about 160 GB each. The OS is Windows 7 (64 bit) and the computer comes with a lot of bloatware installed. I want there to be a small OS partition (20-30 GB, or whatever you’d recommend for Windows 7), and a data partition.

Is it possible to rearrange the partitions so that there will be a 20-30 GB OS partition and a ~300 GB data partition? I know that when there are things already installed on the computer, it complicates partitioning (as opposed to partitioning immediately after installing the OS), so will it be safe to do this considering that there is a lot of bloatware on the computer? Some of the bloatware is essential (it gives you certain functions), so I’d rather not reformat.

But if the only way to do it is reformatting, how do I go about doing this if I don’t have a recovery disk or OS disk? In other words, how would I go about making a recovery disk? If I do reformat, would it install the OS like it was before (with all the bloatware), or would it just be a fresh installation of Windows 7? Which program would you recommend (if you’d recommend partition magic, then which version? I believe I have 8.0)?

Thanks.

 

Windows 7 does allow for some resizing of paritions, but I think there are some limitations to it. I'm not super failiar with it. Perhaps you want to ask in the Windows Forum.

Typically these days notebooks do not come with recovery discs, but allow to burn off a set from your machine. I'm not super familair with Asus. If you use the recovery discs, it will put the notebook back to like when it left the factory, bloatware and all. I would highly recommend making them cause you never know.

If you want a Windows 7 disc, there's links to download them in Windows Forum. You'll need to download all the drivers/apps from Asus' website. They may put a set on the machine if you want to have a look. Again, I'm not super familair with Asus. Good Luck and welcome to NBR.

 

I've never tried this yet, but there's an option in windows 7 to resize a partition. Right click Computer in the start menu and select "Manage." In the left column of the new window choose Storage> Disk Management. Now right click the C: partition and select Shrink Volume.

With this method, I'd wager you aren't in any danger of losing files. If you're still unsure though feel free to back everything up first. It can't hurt.

 

Alternate method.... Windows Key+R opens a Run prompt. Type in diskmgmt.msc and hit enter.


I suggest you back up all your data to an external and delete what you can off the internal disks, as the "shrink/extend" will only shrink a volume to a minimum working capacity with a couple of GB's left free.