Is it possible to partition hard drive under vista home-premium w/o formating??

Does home-premium vista have any utility to parition the hard drive into smaller sizes, or is there any third-party app that can successfully do this without formatting and re-installing everything??

 

i think you can use a program called partition magic, but i dont really know whether it supports windows vista or not

 

Right click on My computer> Click on Manage> on the left pane you should see "Disk Management"> Now right click on your main partition C:, and click "Shrink". It will then tell you whats the available amount you can shrink.

I'll add a screenshot.

In the second screenshot you should see four options.

1. Total Size before shrink in MB - This is telling you how much space you have available on the original drive.

2. Size of available shrink space in MB - This is telling you HOW MUCH you can actually take from the original drive.

3. Enter the amount of shrink space in MB - This is giving you the option to type in how much you want your second partition to be in MB. for example 51200MB is exactly 50GB. etc

4. Total size after shrink in MB - This is telling you whats going to be available on the original drive after you take away some for the second partition.

 

Let me know if you have any other questions. You should do a Google search. You can definitely find a more in depth how-to if you Google it.

 

Thanks Yitzter, this is beautifully explained... it will help... Although I did google it up and I get lot of people saying windows in-built disk management is corrupting the available space on final partition.. has this happened to you?? Also I read ppl recommending Acronis Disk Director software to do the job... any inputs from you abt this??

 

Acronis is great. After I made my recovery discs from the recovery partition, I used Acronis disc director to delete and merge that partition with the primary partition. You can also break it up into other partitions etc.. Acronis is great and it really works well. Also, I used Acronis true image workstation to make a custom bootable recovery disc after I tweaked Vista to my liking. Partition magic is crap after symantec bought them out and drive image (called ghost now) is trash after symantec took over that fine application as well. I highly recommend Acronis disc director and true image workstation. Forget any of the symantec options. The only good application they make is the symantec removable tool.

Just make sure you use one of the newer versions of Acronis that is compatible with Vista.

 

Thanks Hi DesertNM, I have another question regarding True-Image from Acronis. Does it take snap-shot of HD to recover it later to same settings??
I am thinking of doing some cleaning up of bloatware as soon as I receive the shipment of my notebook. So if I lets say install some softwares on vista and uninstall some other softwares and make some registry changes to OS, then use True image to make a recovery disk. So, anytime later if I ever have to use recovery disks, can I use the True-Image version of recovery disks to get back tweaked OS with some softwares of my linking installed and registry changes still intact????

 

Yitzter, the utility you are speaking of to change the partition sizes in Windows isn't available in the Premium version. The only thing you can do inside of Premium is delete a partition, create new partitions, and format a drive, you cannot dynamically change the partition size.

You can go and either get partition magic or acronis disk director. Both of those utilities will allow you to dynamically change your partition sizes without losing your data. This is helpful if you want to delete your recovery partition and add the space to your C: drive.

 

I dont want to delete the recovery partition immediately, but I think having smaller partitions make the searches, defragmentation (of individual partitions) and other operations that needs disk scanning little faster... and safer in case of virus enters the system...

What would you say would be the ideal size for Vista OS partition. How much space should be allocated to it???

 

The best size to leave vista is probably 50GB, because you don't want to install program data on the second partition, it's not recommended, and if you give C: to little space and in the future you have to expand it, that can create a lot of problems.

Be safe and leave vista with 50GB.

 

In my opinion, Paragon Partition Manager is a wonderful app.

 

That's what I explained. How to create a NEW partition by allocating it a specific amount of MB which will come from the C: drive. Are you saying that Home Premium can't doesn't have the shrink utility?

 

On my desktop at home I have a 40GB partition for Windows Vista. I also have a 10GB partition for applications I install, and I have a 40GB partition for games that I install.

I like to keep everything separate as well to help the performance, and in case something happens with the OS, I don't lose everything else. I actually just had to reinstall my OS and because I created the partitions and separated them the way I did it worked out great and I didn't lose any data.

Yes Yitzter, Premium doesn't have the ability to resize partitions without deleting them and recreating them. I can't remember off of the top of my head if the Business version has that feature as well, but I know that Home Basic and Home Premium don't have that ability.

 

Interesting, I thought all windows have that feature. Oh well, I guess not.

Envision, we had this discussion before right, with Orev. Where he said it's not beneficial to have partitions. And I said it was.

In any case, it's a great idea to create partitions and it'll help a lot in the long run.

 

I don't remember that conversation, but I've been creating multiple partitions on my computer since I built my first one. I find it very beneficial from the standpoint that even if something happens to the system drive I won't lose my information. I never save anything on the C: simply because I don't want to trust the OS with my data, and I don't want to waste the time to get the data off before I do a reinstall of the OS if something does happen.

I haven't owned a laptop for a very long time, but I still recommend this method as well, because I like keeping my data safe.

 

I understand. I'm in the exact same situation. When I had to reinstall, I had all my data on a second partition. I reformatted the C: partition and reinstalled vista. All my data was still there on the second partition, unharmed.

 

The only thing I ever have to worry about retrieving from the system volume is the saved game files usually stored underneath the user profiles, which I lost last time I had to reinstall (let's just say I wasn't a happy camper).

 

This has been very helpfull. I have done mine, now it's partitioned. My machine is HP COMPAQ V3000 with Vista Home. Thanks a LOT!