Partitioning Vista

When I first got my laptop, I think I made a mistake by extending the Vista partition to cover the entire drive except the recovery partition. My questions are:

Is this a mistake and should I keep my personal data on a separate partition? I've heard you should keep personal things on a partition other than the system partition.

Should I have kept it the way it was, shrinking the Vista partition and keeping my files on the rest of the drive? If so, how would I go about doing this now after having everything on one partition all this time?

Thanks to anyone who can help.

 

Being able to shrink your primary partition depends on two things:

1. How much free space you have on your primary partition

2. The location of the boot loader on your primary partition.

Number 2 is referring to the fact that sometimes even on a 250GB hard drive, even if you have 200GB free, sometimes you can only shrink the drive by 1 - 10GB since the bootloader for windows will be saved at a very far location in the drive.

To find out what your options are, hit the start button and right click on Computer, then click on Manage.

A Computer Management window will pop up. Click on Disk Management under Storage in the left pane of that window.

This will then show you your hard drive partitions. You can right click on your Primary partition and select the "Shrink" option. There will be on screen instructions from there on which will tell you how much shrinking you can get away with. If the space shrinkable is insufficient, you can turn off Sys restore and hibernation to free up some space, or you can do a backup, format, and choose new partition sizes at that time.

Hope that helped!

 

the best way is to backup all your data on an external hard drive and then try whatever you want , you can partition whatever size you like using paragon partition manager , its free for partitioning option , just be sure to backup your data and you have a recovery disk

 

I can currently shrink the drive about 93 GB. My question is, even after doing this, all my programs and documents from the system partition will remain there, so how can I move them across to the new partition?

 

Your files (meaning docs, media) can be dragged and dropped, however to move programs, you will have to uninstall them and then reinstall them onto the new partition. Moving your media/docs should be more than enough though.