Increasing Partition size

[r2016]

Hi, I have 2 partitions on my laptop; C: 200GB drive, and E: 3GB drive. What I want to do is take rougly 180GB from the C drive and move it to the E drive. I only want to leave enough space on the C drive for the operating system and the assoicated files, and have all my system files saved on the E drive. I want to do this because I have to reload my operating system, so I just want to format the C drive. Any ideas on how to do this

 

[kjv1611]

I'm assuming you're reinstalling Windows on the C: drive, but you don't want to erase all the data on your drive. If you are fine with losing everything on the drive, then just do a custom install of Windows, and specify the partition sizes during the install.

Otherwise, you'll need a 3rd party partition program. In that case, you can try one of the programs here:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

(free)

Or you can go with Acronis Disk Director, the Norton alternative, or others.. (commercial)

 

[goombawaho]

Wouldn't it just be smarter/safer to back up your data elsewhere and keep it totally safe and then go ahead with your reload?? Then, there's no risk reloading windows, changing partitions, etc.

 

[Noway2]

I had a similar situation, where a relative's computer came with a very small C partition and a large D partition. I used an Ubuntu live CD to compress and deflate the D partition and re-allocated the space to C. Very easy to do using gparted from Ubuntu.

*** One thing to note, and this would apply regardless of what tool you use, if one or more of the partitions is NTFS you will need to do a reboot between the steps of deflating and then resizing the partitions, otherwise you may run into integrity problems with the drive.

 

[Nelviticus]

If you're using Windows 7 you should be able to shrink the C: partition then grow E: to fill the vacant space, see here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

Nelviticus

 

[cdogg]

Besides Ubuntu, there is Parted Magic which also includes GParted but is a smaller download (80MB versus 700MB). Using it's interface, I've not yet had issues resizing partitions (out of about 20-25 uses). You also don't have to reboot until the operations you selected are applied to the drive.

As goombawaho mentions though...take extra precautions if sensitive data is involved. Make sure you have a backup just in case if you want to avoid the risk of data loss.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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