Partitioning withot Partition Magic...

I just got received my nc8430 and I am having trouble trying to partition. I thought a simple restore of the PC would give me the option to partition. Can I partition and reformat the drives if I boot from the recovery DVD's I created?

Thanks

grazzt

 

Happy new laptop!
Do you want to keep the recovery partition or do you want to kill it?
*points at the siggy*

 

I'm a big fan of just wiping everything with gdisk or delpart and starting from there.

 

I will keep the recovery partition as a safety net. Are the above free ulities? If so, is there a quick how to, to do the re-format booting up from a CD? Thoughts? Advice?

 

Gdisk is not free, you must have a copy of Symantec Ghost. Delpart is free and you can choose which partions to delete. It's DOS based, so you need bootable media with delpart on there, then you just run the executable.

But let me get this right... You want to delete the primary partition, keep the recovery partition and then... do what? Just recreate the primary partition and format it?

 

I have Ghost 10.0 and 2003. Never used it. I tried it, but I can create a boot CD, only a floppy which I do not have one. unless I borrow a USB floppy drive from work. This might work? Then copy the files over to the CD and I should have boot CD correct?

As for the C: drive. I want to partition it into 2 drives, 1 for the OS and 1 for Data, media, other files. The split to be 30 Gig for OS, rest for the Data partition minus the recovery partition.

I want to keep the Recovery partition as a safe gaurd because if I run out of space, I will use an external drive.

 

Bump to top

 

You might be able to do it in Windows.
Search for "compmgmt.msc" in Start Menu; run it.
Choose Disk Management on the left.
Right click on C drive and choose Shrink Volume
Put in how much you want to shrink it by and after that just create a new volume.

 

I do not have that option to shrink the volume. Is it that I have XP and not Vista? Any thoughts?

 

Let me get this straight, you want to repartition and split things up. Lemme help.

1) No, the restore DVDs will not give you that choice. I've tried.
2) Make ISOs of the restore DVDs, burn a copy, and keep those ISOs in another location for any dark times ahead when you need them.
3) Download GParted Live CD. Burn CD, reboot.
4) Use GParted to shrink your OS partition, and create any new partitions you need.
5) The recovery partition might not work after you do #4, hence the need to create those ISOs and copies of the discs. As long as you keep those, you'll be fine. I'd nuke the recovery partition if I were you, since the discs have it all there. Claim back some HDD space.

In the future, if you have to use those discs (your safety net as it were), you'll have the option to do a non-destructive recovery (that's their terminology and not mine). It will wipe out your first OS partition (or your first partition period, so keep XP in the first one) and replace it with the factory image. That non-destructive recovery will preserve your other partitions, though I'd back up all your files just in case something goes wrong (I've had an itchy trigger finger accidentally choose the wrong option before).

I've done a lot of partitioning on my nc8430, so hopefully these steps will help you out. If you need more info, I'll try to help you out as best I can.

 

thanks n2004. I created the recovery DVD's. But what is ISO?

 

ISOs are just files that are copies of CDs or DVDs. If you save one, you basically have an image of a DVD stored on a hard drive.

If you're curious...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image

 

Have you used Norton Ghost before? I do have this program. Gdisk is part of ghost. I just need to creat a boot CD. After I create a floppy boot disk, I should be able to transfer the files from the floppy to the CD. Is this OK to do?

Scott

 

So if I do the following will this work?

1 - Create a workable boot cd by tranferring the files from a floppy made by Nortan Ghost 2003
2 - Reformat the C Drive partition and keeping the D Drive partition.
3 - Split C in to 2 drives with GDisk.exe (30 gig/60 gig)
4 - Restart PC with the Recovery disks in the DVD drive and start over.

Will this work?