So I am the owner of a shiny new laptop, and I am looking to divide my OS partition so I have the OS on one partition and general files on the other.
I tried using the Shrink feature, but I wasn’t satisfied with what it told me it could shrink to. There’s 414GB free on that partition and it couldn’t split it up any smaller than two approx. 200GB partitions. I’m looking more for 50GB for the OS partition and 350GB for the files partition.
Reading the documentation, it said it couldn’t really move files, which made me think I needed to defrag so there weren’t files scattered, but that didn’t change anything.
This is a prefab machine, so using the recovery feature won’t help because it’ll just set the partitions back that way.
I’ve heard of PartitionMagic, but is it smart enough to know not to mess up the OS part?
First, let me echo Quartz – I’m not sure I’d bother. I used to have this set up on all my previous machines and I haven’t bothered on my new Windows 7 setup. Really I’m not sure you need to anymore but you may have your own reasons so …
Have you used the machine much since you got it? It’s odd that defragging it wouldn’t group the files at the start of the disk – it normally does.
I guess it’s possible that there’s a system file stuck in the middle of the disk, defragging might not move that. I can’t remember if the Windows 7 defragger runs under windows or if it does it on a restart. If it runs while windows is running then it might not be able to move certain files, you should be able to see from the output of the defragger. I’m not at my machine now so I can’t check how it works.
I’ve used Partition Magic on previous machines and it worked perfectly, ignoring system files. However I’ve heard that Windows 7 is very twitchy about people tweaking it’s partitions so I’d wait for someone to confirm they’ve tried this before you do it.
Also, it’s not free. You might want to look into a Linux boot CD with a free partition tool on it if you feel comfortable doing that.
I take it a clean re-install is out of the question as you don’t have the original media – can you request the original install disks from your vendor.
I did exactly what you aim to do, with my new Windows 7 laptop, using Gparted to resize partitions and Macrium Reflect for backup.
Gparted can be downloaded as an iso and then used to burn a boot CDROM. You boot from the CD and then change the partition sizes. When I did this it appeared to hang when it had finished but it was just because it had ejected the CD for some reason - push it back in and it finishes the job.
Macrium reflect clones partitions quite handily and I’ve been using it for a few months now without problems.
A quick heads-up - Gparted will probably find more partitions than you expect. The laptop manufacturer will probably have a secret partition, and Windows 7 sometimes has a 100 MB secret partition. I left both alone.
PartitionMagic is apparently not worked on anymore and stopped at supporting XP, so that’s out.
Microsoft’s site says:
So I’ll try that tonight when I get home from work to see if I can find the file that is blocking me shrinking the partition to anything smaller. Someone commented on that article says that it came up with stuff like system restore points and Windows search indexes and once he got rid of those it was fine.
So if anyone was wondering, apparently System Restore was hogging around 100GB in a hidden folder. Deleting all my System Restore points (I had gone through and uninstalled all the bloatware, which is probably why there was so much data) freed up a lot more space for Windows 7 to do its partitioning thing.
Why not bother? Windows 7 can still be compromised by malware, and you can still get benefits from being able to quickly reformat and reinstall.
If it’s that it’s easy to get all your files out without having to create them–how is it any easier than in XP?
I personally wish it were that easy to keep programs separate, so that you wouldn’t even have to reinstall them. That was a nice advantage with Linux. I know you won’t want to keep the entire registry backed up, but it would be nice if most programs could keep backups of their settings, and reapply them to the registry if the registry gets deleted.
And I’ve never had System Restore help me do anything I couldn’t do myself. I always shut it down.