How to extend boot drive in Win XP? 1

[johnnygeo]

I have a Sony laptop with a 40GB hard drive. The drive was partitioned by Sony into a C: (15 GB) and a D: (25 GB), and the C: was rapidly running out of space. I used XP's Disk Management tool to remove the partition, not realizing that it wouldn't automatically extend the C: drive to include the space formerly known as D:

Now I'm kind of stuck. I need to either restore the partition or extend the C: drive. I tried using system restore, but that says that changes to drive D: can't be reversed. I don't have a floppy drive, so I tried to use "ultimate boot CD". I was able to boot to the CD, but can't figure out how to extend the drive using any of those tools. I tried to run diskpart.exe, but that doesn't work except from the XP command line.

Can anyone provide me with a process for either restoring the partition or extending the drive to allocate the missing space? Whichever is the easier task is fine by me. The current C: volume is formatted as NTFS.

Thanks,
Johnny Geo

 

[johnnygeo]

I should also mention that I don't have Win XP installation CDs, just the Sony recovery CDs. I would greatly prefer not having to go through the whole recovery process, though.

 

[wolluf]

To manipulate partitions in XP without starting from scratch, you need either a third party app - like Partition magic, or you could use disk management to make it a dynamic disk (which has additional features over a basic disk, including the ability to extend partitions). This is a one way conversion (ie, XP doesn't provide tools to revert, though at least one third party - Paragon - does). However, dynamic disks are not available for portable computers - which I presume rules out your laptop (or XP Home).

So you need a third party partitioning tool (the only free one I know of was quite difficult to use last time I tried it -

http://www.ranish.com/part/).

 

[johnnygeo]

Ranish Partition Manager is on the "ultimate boot CD", but it doesn't seem to work with NTFS.

 

[daveoasis]

Contact Gene at this site, explain problem. He gives excellent presentations to our user group & will help you out. Probably an Acronis product. Also see Partition Magic as an alternate.

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[johnnygeo]

Thanks, guys, but at this point I think I am going to suck it up and go through the Sony recovery process.