partitioning HDD on desktop

chrisalviola

New Member
Is there a way I can partition my desktop HDD on MSDOS without loosing files, same with partition magic exept in MSDOS.
 
With Fat16 or Fat32 you would use fdisk for that. For simply shrinking an existing partition there are a few retail programs that will run while Windows is loaded for making changes to a partiton other then the OS primary there. To shrink a partition in order to create a new one one good free Linux drive tool known the Gnome Partition Editor or GParted is available in live for cd versions.

You can create/ delete, shrink or grow partitions. Then you would use the Disk Management tool found in XP for formatting a new one. The files are generally left intact on the first partition. With GParted you boot from the cd-r you burn the 35mb iso image to the run that from it's own gui. For splitting partitions and not simply shrinking one to leave space for another that's a different story where you usually have nothing on the intended partition.
 
Sorry I meant partition magic. Partition magic will be able to do that, but I strongly advise you to BACK UP all the files that you need before you undertake such a task, because should there be a black out or something unexpected, you will lose your data. Norton Ghost does disk imaging.
 
Acronis also has a disk clone and imaging software. The term partitioning means preparing a drive by setting boudries for a logical drive even if that is less the total space seen on the physical drive. You then format a new partition according to the OS going on or for access by one OS. With an existing partition there are four things that can be done with it.

The first is the one you don't want namely deletion. 2+3) are covered with resizing and existing partition to make it larger or smaller. 4) goes into splitting a partition into segments. That would be very much like the #1 item for you there. You still haven't specified exactly what you are trying to do since the term partitioning applies to something else.
 
The old dos method employs fdisk for the dreation or removal of partitions as well as setting the size while creating one. Dispark essentially does the same thing from the recovery console when booting the system with the XP installation disk. It creates allowing for determining size or deletes partitions. You can't use that to resize an existing one. Vista now sees that option in the Disk Management tool there along with the format option in the repair tools section when booting with the installation disk.

The main thing to understand here is that partitioning is done to either bare drives or by shrinking an existing partition unless unallocated drive space still remains available to create a new one. To see more on Disl Part itself go to http://www.computerhope.com/diskpart.htm
 
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