When I bought my current computer, I let some idiot talk me into doing a 20Gig partition for my boot drive. Now, I’m not against partitioning drives, but 20Gig on XP Pro is minuscule. No matter how careful I am about making sure software puts itself on one of the other drives, there’s always stuff that insists on being on the boot drive, and it’s gotten to the point that every time I install something new I’ve got to scrounge around on the C: drive to come up with enough room for it to be happy.
So I’ve got to bite the bullet and re-partition.
I’m going to do a complete backup beforehand, no worries.
So here’s the questions:
Will Partition Magic do this? Or is there a better way/better software?
If my case will support it (I’ll have to open it up and look), I’m tempted to just buy a brand new big fast nice drive and make that my C: drive instead of screwing around with repartitioning at all. I seem to recall that it’s not as easy as just backing up my C: drive and restoring it to the new drive to recreate the boot disk. Or is it? Would this be a more straightforward way to get me where I’m going?
Is there any other really fast & easy way to do what I want that I haven’t listed? Ultimately, I just want to get from Point A (too-small boot partition) to Point B (nice big boot partition) the fastest & easiest way possible. I am willing to spend money to do this.
I’m running XP Pro. I absolutely hate doing this kind of IT stuff. Hell, I’m half tempted to just buy a whole new computer, I hate it that much, but I’m guessing that’s probably an overreaction.
That is exactly what I DON’T want to do - this is a work computer, I can’t afford to spend days & days screwing around with it and reinstalling all my software. Ain’t gonna happen.
Partition Magic can do a partition merge, but be careful if you decide to go that route, if it fails it will fail spectacularly and if you havent backed stuff up, it will be gone.
I don’t want to do a merge, because I have tons of software installed on the D: partition on the same drive - like I said, I’m trying to keep my existing system as-is as much as possible.
I’ve done this before using a bootable linux CD. I think the tool I used was GParted (GNU Partition Editor). It seems kinda weird to use linux to repartition a windows box, but that’s exactly what I used it for. You’ll need to shrink the D partition first, then once that is done you can make the C partition bigger.
Worst case, it will futz up your disk and require you to do a re-install, but the few times I’ve used it, it worked fine and was relatively painless.
I used Partition Magic for many years, and was considering buying a new edition a few months ago, but in searching for freeware, I found EASEUS, which has a free home edition. It worked every bit as well and as easily as Partition Magic.
Partition Magic became part of the fine family of Symantec Products. In other words, it has been dormant since 2003 with major unfixed bugs. It also doesn’t run under MS Vista.
It used to be a good product but I can no longer recommend it. Go with one of the other programs suggested above.
