help! unable to partition HDD- new T61

the situation:
I bought a new t61 with win vista home basic preloaded. followed arkit3kt's excellent guide to format my hdd and installed winXP-pro. however i did not delete or format the recovery partition (6GB) thinking that I could use it later if i ever needed vista for whatever reason. (i have also made the set 0f 8 recovery CDs).

the problem:
1. I have a 120 GB HDD with 1 hidden (recovery partition) and 1 main partition (with Win XP Pro). I want to partition my primary as follows:
- A 15 GB partition for win xp + programs
- the rest for data, backups etc.
Ideally I would like to do this without formatting my HDD with the Win-xp installation disk and reinstalling all the drivers, etc. I am hoping it can be done without going thru the pain of a re-install.

2. I want to create an image of my win-xp installation plus drivers and updates, so that i can restore the machine from this image. Is norton ghost the best option? DOes anyone have experience with this? are there better alternatives?


tries so far:
I tried using partition magic 8.0 and it returned "Error 117: Partition's drive letter cannot be identified".

(May be due to the presence of a hidden/recovery partition.)

I tried fixing possible errors with chkdsk, but that was no help.

What should I do?

Possible solutions from googling around:
1. try acronis disk director?
2. try a GNU/ open source option like Gparted?

this forum is now my last resort since you guys are so helpful..
thanks for taking the time

 

It's not the hidden/recovery partition.

Try acronis disk director.....it's much better than PM8 from my experience.


Regards creating an image, Acronis Home 11 is the best, er....there is a trial 15 days version on official site. Use it as it is fully funcational.

 

i recommend a fresh format partition and reinstall because by using either pm8 or acronis u mess up with system and registry paths (a reference in registry to d: - which is now ur cd drive will still be that way on ur format - but ur secondary partition comes in way of this system path). this may cause many problems. most will not show any error messages directly however u can view them in
control panel>>administrative tools>>event viewer. u can see lots of missing path errors there if u do it this way. So the better option for u is to do a complete reistall with partitioning. Install the drivers and required programs. then use acronis back up to create an image of this system state to an external hdd so that ur next reinstall would be painless. Try the painful option for just this time for better performance and reliability of your machine

 

@ ideasmiths, kuncheesh
thanks a lot for the tips. will try and hope it works.

 

update:
just fyi for those who have this problem and end up searching this forum.
Acronis products worked superbly (disk director and true image ver 11).
was able to partition my hdd, and clone my os partition successfully.
Partition magic 8 and norton ghost did not do so great.
PM failed totally(to make a partition), while ghost did work (in cloning my whole hdd), but I preferred Acronis since the interface and control felt more familar to me.

Recommend acronis as per my experience. YMMV.

 

Good B-)

Just another side note. From my experience, try NOT to burn recovery disc (ie 7CDR or 1CDR + 2 DVD). Instead, find an external USB drive, use acronis to create the recovery media on this USB drive.

After that, then burn the hidden 4GB partition on the USB drive to a DVD.

The reason is that during the creation of the recovery discs straight after factory restore, sometimes the burning process fails (BUT no report from RnR). In the future when you are in trouble and try to use the disc, mayhem occurs.

I have used USB drives so far for my T43, X60, X60Tablet and now T61 and there has never been a problem.

PS: Buy Acronis if you find em good after the trial

 

I have Acronis True Image and Drive Director but not sure what you mean. Are you saying to make an image of the hidden partition on the USB drive?

What is it that your are burning to the DVD? and how do you use that?

 

This was really unnecessary. The Vista installation disk has everything you need to do this.