Help Moving and Resizing Partitions

M

MitchellLutzke

New Member
Ok, so here is my problem. My hard drive is currently formatted like this

|-------D: empty 146gig-------|--------C: Windows Vista 143gig---------|

I cannot extend the windows vista partition to take advantage of the empty space because it is placed after the empty space on my hard drive, preventing me from extending the partition.

Vista is letter C and the empty space is formatted as D. What I need to do is somehow move the vista partition to the front of the disk so I can extend it to take up some of the empty space. I would like it to be like this.

|------C: Windows Vista---250gig------|--D:small_backup_partition--50gig|

Is this possible at all WITHOUT reinstallation? What might help is the vista partition is smaller than the space of the empty partition.

Thanks for any help anyone can provide me with. I do not have any other hard drives to move data to besides an 80gig, so I'm pretty much limited to moving data around on this disk. Also if needed I can use the partition editor on my ubuntu live cd, but it tends to be a little flaky at times so I would rather not.

Edit: Sorry, just realized this probably should be in the hard drive category, sorry about that, new to the forum.

What I was thinking I could do was copy the contents of the vista partition to the empty partition, then I would probably have to change the BCD to pick up the right partition when booting or I could probably run the cd and see if it repairs and recovers it. Then I would change the drive letter to C.
 
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Go to start menu and right click "computer" and click "manage". Then click "disk management" under storage. Right click on the drive and you can change the drive letter and path and also extend the volume's.
 
I can't do that because windows vista partition is at the end of the disk while the free partition is at the front, I can't extend it to include the free partition in the front because apparently the free space has to be in a partition after the windows vista partition :/
 
Then I would say just backup all your data on another pc or an external HDD and reformat and do it the correct way!
 
I was hoping to find a way to do this without reinstallation, but I guess it just isn't possible. I was trying to do it without reinstallation because I'm the main tech person in the family and my dad goes nuts when I have to take up 3-4 days setting up the computer. Thanks for your help anyway though.
 
Use a program like Norton Ghost to copy from one partition to the other, but then you are going to have to get another program such as partition magic to make the other partition as an Active MBR!
 
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