Trying to free hardrive space using BootiT NG

[monkster]

Hi,
I have an P3 that I got from Dell with Win 98SE installed on it. I want to upgrade to XP Pro. I don't have enough space on my C: drive to install. The good folks at Dell sent my new PC with the hard drive(12gb) partitioned into 6 volumes when I bought it. Anyway after moving/deleting etc I still can't free enough space on my C: drive to install XP. I bought BootIT NG to try and fix the problem. I have
plenty of drive space. I can free up plenty of space from other volumes but BootIt won't let me "rezize" C: any larger (2GB) than it already is for some reason. I can down size but not increase size. Can I merge 2 volumes? for example C: and D:? What about duplicate file names? Does anyone know why BootIt is not allowing me to increase the size of my c: volume? I converted all of the volumes to FAT32. I don't won't to install a new hard drive as I am not saavy enough to do so!

Thanks,
Mark

 

[wolluf]

Have you got a backup device (eg, CD burner)? Because IMO, best way forward would be to back up all your critical data, then wipe the drive (ie, remove ALL partitions) and do a clean install of XP with whole drive as one partition (you can do the remove/create partition bit with XP install's partitioning tools after booting from XP CD).

I say this as upgrades from 98 to XP are much more likely to cause future problems than clean install.

PS. I don't know why bootit ng is not doing what you want - last time I tried it was several years ago (for its boot manager) - so not sure what its features are now - though I see from the site that merging partitions is not mentioned in the feature list. So I suspect you would need to delete partitions (so you have unpartitioned space) in order for bootit to be able to resize C: drive larger. Partition Magic is the most common choice for manipulating partitions (straightforward, and the same sort of price as bootit - in fact cheaper in the US).

 

[RICHINMINN]

Partition Magic is a product that I've had excellent results with in merging multiple partitions into one, without disturbing the data that's on them (unless the partitions are pretty well filled up). Two partitions are merged at a time, starting at C: and working upward. When merging drives C: and D:, for example, drive C: needs enough space to hold all of the files from D:. You may need to move files around to the other partitions to allow the merge to happen. (Or else you might need to offload the contents of one of the partitions to free up enough room to allow all of the other partitions to be merged.)

This is the first time that I've heard of a system having more than 4 partitions, though. Is this a feature of NTFS?

Partition Magic, in the last couple of versions, could work with both FAT and NTFS partitions.

Rich (in Minn.)

 

[monkster]

I installed Partition Magic 8.0. I get the following error message: Error 626 Operation is to be performed on a hard drive not visible from boot mode. Power Quest recommends the following...

Cause 3: If this error is reported when resizing a partition on a large RAID drive in boot mode, the problem is that the partition is on a slave drive on the RAID controller and is detected as drive 3 in the chain. Drives 0, 1, and 2 are left undetected when the drives post.


Fix 3: Change the affected RAID drive to master so the system can detect it as drive 0.

How do I go about changing the affected RAID drive to master???

Thanks!

 

[Jontmke]

I agree partially with wolluf. But, I would use Ghost or some other Imager. I would make an Image of the c: drive then repartion and reformat it into a bigger partition then restore the Image onto the bigger partition then install XP.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)