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Best way to repartition Win XP hard drive?

16 years ago

I have a friend who is only moderately computer savvy, who has a 5-year old Sony Viao running XP. It has a 100GB hard Drive that came partitioned into a 20 GB C drive and an 80 GB drive. You can see where this is going....

He has the C drive over 95% full and the D drive about 3% full, and of course he has all kinds of performance issues. Besides moving photo and other optional files over to the D drive, I explained that he could uninstall programs on the C drive that he has added and reinstall them on the D drive, but that the best solution is to increase the size of the C partition, or even remove the partition entirely. What are his options without having to do a reformatting of the whole hard drive? I know that he could get a copy of Partition Magic, but are there other programs out there -- maybe even free ones -- that he could use? And I'd like to make it fairly simple for him because I'm not going to be able to be there in person when he does this.

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Comments (6)

zep516
16 years ago
Here's what a lot of folks are using now,

EASEUS Partition Master 5.0.1 - Best Free Magic Partition Manager
http://www.partition-tool.com/

As far as giving you advice forget it not my area.

Here is a link that might be useful: partition-tool
owbist
16 years ago
There is nothing wrong with installing programs to the D drive. Once I had the operating system there but some other programs were programmed to only seek the OS on C so life got a little complicated till I wiped the drive. We use C because originally we had A as the small Floppy, B was the 5.25 floppy so the next sensible choice was C. There will be no adverse effect at all, it will generate the much needed space on the C drive where he will obviously leave the operating system. Plus all the program pointers will still lead to the OS on C for start up and running..

I used the Easeus program Zep refers to once, it must have gone alright because I have no bad thoughts on the program.
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ravencajun Zone 8b TX
16 years ago
If he really does not know what he is doing he runs the risk of wiping out his C drive, personally I do not suggest trying partitioning for those that are not fairly computer experienced, with out guidance at hand. I see every day, people who were trying to partition their windows to put in linux or some other OS on part of the drive, and are now frantic because some how all their stuff is gone.
Since he already has the 2 partitions, I think you have the best way to go with what you have told him to do use it exactly as it is and keep his C drive nice and clean, put his data and stuff on the other partition. At the same time go through and clean out and eliminate completely what is no longer needed.

Every linux live cd comes with a great partition tool built in and you can get a linux live cd free or burn an iso of a distro to make your own live cd.

This link is one that was given to me way back when I first needed to partition a drive for my linux, it does a good job of covering the basics. Studying several of these tutorials is always an excellent idea.
How To: Repartition Your Hard Drive For Free Without Formatting or Losing Data

and before doing anything I sure would get one of the free drive imaging programs and do a few images of the drive in case something goes bad.
unseen_garden
16 years ago
If you know someone who has a windows 7 computer you could put that hard drive into it as a slave and use the native windows 7 partition resizer.

Unseen Garden
owbist
16 years ago
How amazing, unseen_garden joined just today just to impart that wisdowm - and to advertise his ware in the link.
mikie_gw
16 years ago
I used to use Windows xp disk managment to resize partitions long time ago. Right click myComputer and chose manage.. go down to disk managment and poke the help file on anything you dont understand.

Wasnt unusual for me to make new partitions or resize existing partitions ,,, pretty simple interface there. And it tries not to let you screw up.. but you do have to think.

Sounds like basicly I might do something like make a third partition in the larger part. then...
Move the contents of the existing larger partitions into the new part temporarly .....then expand C another 20gb

Or just remove all from the larger drive and expand C.. then put back the files you removed. ... its really pretty simple.

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