My Dad’s friend Dad has messed about with said friend’s computer, and now he has 4 partitions on his 6 gig hard drive. Unfortunately this is causing some problems–he’s getting memory errors coming up.
I’m going over there tonight to try and sort it out (as well as eat some cheese and drink some wine). He would like it to be partioioned still, but to have only 2 partitions.
Do you think it will be practical to do this (formatting the HD is out)? Will I need to use the same partitioning software his Dad used?
Sorry I can’t be more specific about the computer itself or the errors he is getting, but I haven’t seen it for myself yet.
Unfortunately (unless there’s some newfangled software out that I don’t know about), you will have to delete some partitions, which means loosing all the data on them. You’ll probably be able to keep the partition the OS is loaded on, delete four of them, then resize the other one. It shouldn’t matter what program you use, but whatever program was used to do the original partitioning should still be loaded.
If it’s a fear of losing data, I’d recommend getting Partition Magic and killing off the (presumably) E: and F: partitions. Make sure there’s no data in them that you want to keep, first.
Put all the data you want to keep on the D: partition. Make sure there’s nothing on D: except your data. Make sure there’s nothing to be kept out on the E: and F: partitions. Fire up PM. Tell it to zap E: and F: and not save anything from them. Add the reclaimed space to D: Set C: to 3 GB and D: to 3 GB (or whatever it works out as.
Do a clean install of Windows on C: Once done, tell Windows that “My Documents” is located on the D: partition.
For final cleanup, make sure there’s nothing on the D: partition except the My Documents/Pictures/Music, etc. folders. There must not be a Windows folder, or you’ll be in for much confusion as Windows trys to run itself out of two folders.
Now, you should be able to re-install applications and all should be well with the PC, other than having a rather small drive.
Frankly, you could buy a huge new drive for less than the price of Partition Magic. (I just bought a 200 GB drive for $70) Why not just buy a new drive, do a nice fresh install of Windows on it, then temporarily re-introduce the 6GB drive (you’ll probably need to re-jumper it as slave) to copy the data off of it on the new drive’s “My Documents” folders then remove and toss that dinky drive.
You can get free partitioning software if you have a CD burner. Google for “System Rescue CD” and get the latest. It’s a bootable CD, and you can boot it and type “run_qtparted” to get a partition magic clone that’s capable of almost everything you need to do partition-wise. The only thing it has trouble with is NTFS partitions. Last I checked, it could resize, but not move them.
I used it myself to resize my XP partition and install linux.
Partitions should not be causing any memory errors. Partitions are not necessarily a bad thing. You should post the errors here before you make a mistake.
I don’t like using 3rd party partition management products like partition magic if I can support it. Windows wasn’t made to work with products like that, so there’s no guarantee it will work like you expect. There are adequate tools in windows to delete and create partitions if you feel like you need to.
OK. Thanks for all the advice you’ve given so far.
The problem is more complicated than first thought. He’s ‘upgraded’ from Windows Me to XP since his Dad partitioned the drive, and the errors (basically saying ‘HD Space Low’) have been coming up since then.
We can’t use the partitioning software his Dad used in the first place because it doesn’t work with XP. We don’t have Partition Magic and don’t particularly plan on shelling out for it as, like gotpasswords said, it is expensive.
He doesn’t have much data on there anyway, so we decided to reformat the hard drive and start again. But Windows XP wouldn’t let us do that and we couldn’t find a way to reboot to MS Dos Prompt like you can in older versions of Windows.
It sounds like, in repartitioning and upgrading Windows, he set up a very small or very filled partition as the one holding the swap file. Just change your virtual memory settings to use a partition with plenty of room left on it - I can’t walk you through it as I’m stubbornly using 98se until I have a reason not to.
Are you still stuck? The one thing I can suggest is try and boot from the XP CD. This may require going into the BIOS and setting the CD rom as a higher priority boot device than the fixed disk.
If you’re lucky, one of the installation options should be to destroy the entire disk and use the whole thing for the XP installation. I know that XP pro full version does that. I don’t know about the home edition, or about the upgrade editions, thus why I say ‘try’ and boot the CD. What does it say on the XP CD about which version it is?