Hard Drive Partitioning

Hey guys,

I just got my computer back from the repair shop, and among other things i asked them to partion my hard drive along with a windows reinstall.

...but they didnt partion it, and because i dont want to reinstall windows and do it, im wondering if theres a way to partiton the HDD without a windows reinstall

i looked at a program called bootitng, but i wasnt sure exactly what it did so didnt risk it.

When you asked them to partition your drive and reinstall Windows they most likely assumed you meant wiping the then current primary to see a clean install on a new one. Are you trying to create a second partition for storing files?

Without reinstalling Windows you would shrink the C primary in size to then see a certain amount of unallocated drive space(empty) where you would then create a second primary or extended type partition. This would be done with a drive parititioning tool where you would then use that or another similar tool to see the second partition created. Partitions are later formatted to be made available for use.

ive used partiton magic in the past and worked well.
Others will know if freeware is available.

Others will know if freeware is available.

Click to expand...

GParted

I personally use paragon disk manager 8.5, however you do have to pay for it and it doesnt work well on Vista. you can do it all through wizards so its quite easy to get going. Its an excellent tool.

In Vista the Disk Management tool can be used for resizing(shrinking or expanding) partitions as well as creating or deleting them as long as it's other then the one Windows is installed onto. Yet even Vista still sees the occasional odd 1mb of drive space that GParted always shows when that is used later.

Vistas own disk management can also resize the system drive. This is one of the new features of vista. XP was only able to extend data drives

The DM in XP can only create, delete, and format as well as change drive letters. That's all for now there folks. The Windows volume still has to be resized while booting up from the installation disk or the use of an external drive tool like GParted while no part of Windows is being loaded into ram.

For seeing a totally new partition created for Windows to go on or to simply see the present primary reformatted that will require a full clean install of Windowss and all programs afterwards. The main question now would be why you would want to see the drive reparitioned or reformatted if Windows is up and running as it should?

Shrinking the current partition would allow for creating a second one for storing files. A newly created second partition would then need to be formatted in order to be avaialable for use.