Whoever set my family computer up has divided the 40GB into two, neatly down the middle. This is a not at all a good solution for my family, as they don't have a clue, and the D: partition is 99% free. The C: drive is almost completely full, so I was wondering if there was a way to remove the partition, but without reinstalling windows and reformatting.

What did you create the partition with?

Get yourself a copy of Partition Magic, and de partition it from there, should work fine.

i thought it isnt possible.. i was thinking a good alternative would be just moving your folders into your other drive and create shortcuts into accessing them in your desktop for your family members. I do it with my own computer.

<font color=skyblue>I have never used partitioning software, so I would have no idea if one could be used and keep existing data, therefore I would agree here with Harkie that moving some stuff from one part. to the other is the "safe" and "quick" route, not to mention saving you the cost of buying the software that you might not use often enough to make the cost worth it.

But I've been wrong before...</font>

Beyond the natural risks involved fiddling with your partition table, it's a perfectly quick and pretty safe procedure. I've done it many many times (like ~50) with no problems, but if you are really risk-averse then the alternative of copying is of course 100% risk free. Just make sure you don't have a power cut in the middle ;)

The method is to simply delete the second partition and then expand the first. The only thing I would suggest you do is defragment both partitions first - that minimizes the chance of Windows drives choking on the resize.

Partition Magic is an excellent choice, as Ross suggests, but there are decent free alternatives available as well. Something like fdisk (the linux one) will be fine (if you don't need graphics), the ultimate boot cd has a few, and the system rescue cd has a few, including a graphical partition magic clone.

The only thing I'd suggest is that if you go for a free one you run it past us first to make sure it's decent as there is no doubt some rubbish out there.

Oh yes, and backup your data first. No, really! ;)

[ 04-10-2006, 02:04 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

Grpahical interface would certainly be nice, as would free, as I will use this once, and once only ;)

If you could recommend a particular one that would be great! :D

Edit: Perhaps from this site?

[ 04-11-2006, 06:52 AM: Message edited by: Callum ]

That site seems to recommend much of the same - I would go for the System Rescue CD if you can stomach a 128MB download.

It is Linux based, but you won't need to actually know anything about Linux to do this. It's the one I've used to resize my NTFS partitions and it's never had a problem.

Simply pop it in and boot from the cd, type 'menu' to get a graphical setup screen. Set the appropriate options using your cursor keys and space bar if needed (like language for your keyboard) then tell it to boot.

You'll get dropped to a command line (like a DOS prompt) and all you have to do is type

run_qtparted

to get you the partition manager. I think that's the right command, but if you start typing run_qt and hit <tab> a couple of times it will autocomplete.

You should see a partionmagic-like interface and you should have a mouse cursor too. It's simple and very effective in my experience. If for some reason the mouse isn't working, tab space and the arrow keys will see you right. Delete the second one, resize the first and then commit your changes when you're done.

Simply quit and then type

shutdown -r now

to reboot.


Usual caveat - this is all at your own risk of course ;)

Other ones on your website - Ranish is very powerful, but not as easy to use as the above programme. As for NTFSResize, QTParted already uses it in the background so that's not an alternative.

Hope that helps!

[ 04-11-2006, 08:53 AM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

Oh... these things involve saving to CD? Well that's out... ah well... it's only the family computer... not mine ;)

Lol, you can fit entire linux distributions on a floppy disk if necessary, but you'll be lucky to get a graphical interface. ;)

The easiest thing in that case would be to use your Windows cd which (i think?) comes with fdisk if you go to the recovery console?

Or just make a bootdisk with it on from scratch.

But yeah, possibly getting a bit of a hassle - just move their my documents folder to the other partition and point Windows to the right place [img]smile.gif[/img]

I think that might be easiest... [img]tongue.gif[/img]