I want to departition my drive - what's involved?

[Memnoch]

G'day all, I had a spare 2 mins in my MBA schedule so I thought I'd pop in with a quick question.

OK, here's the deal. When I bought my Sony VAIO, the muppets in charge decided to partition my drive (which was stupid as the drive was only 60GB anyway). So I ended up with 15GB in the "C" partition (I think I lost 5GB to housekeeping or system files or something) and 40GB in the "D" partition.

Since I didn't have a choice in it being partitioned I decided to use the C drive for all "essential" programs and all system-based stuff as well as for everything which is in My Documents (excluding Music or videos). I've been running on about 2GB of free space over the past few months, with heaps of free space in D.

This is now becoming a problem mainly because:

- the amount of documents I am saving to C is increasing because of grad school (all going into My Documents where my filing system is)
- EA Games decides to save all its custom files in My Documents (eg I have about 4GB in Sims 2 custom files alone)

I want to do either of the following:

- move all my Sims 2 custom files into my D drive to free up space on the C drive. Unfortunately it seems as though there's no way you can edit the game settings to look for your files in any folder other than C:My Documents. If someone has information to the contrary please tell me!

Alternatively, I want to:

- departition my drive and just have one big drive. I've got a fairly fast drive (7200RPM) and I don't think I derive significant benefits from departitioning. But I heard somewhere that departitioning (I assume I will have to departition D) will cause ALL info on D to be erased. I could possibly back it all up into my USB drive (F) but I'm concerned about registry settings for games/programs etc. If I move it all will it cause a problem with some of my programs not working?

Any feedback from the techies would be appreciated!

[Memnoch]

Actually, nevermind - I managed to resolve it by moving my My Documents folder.

[T-D-C]

Partition Magic by Symantec (formally Powerquest) should be able to do this for you (if you still want to departition the hard drive).

PM me if you want a legal copy

[Morgeruat]

I was gonna say, just move the "my documents" folder (make sure to change where it's looking for the folder to the location you moved it to so you don't lose info), doesn't cure the problem, but it should alleviate it a bit for now.

Most likely the 5GB was left unpartitioned in case of a system crash, so that they could reinstall windows to the unpartitioned space and recover as much of your personal information as possible (I tend to leave about that much free on my own PC for the same reason)

As TDC said, Partition Magic should be able to fix your problem (as in actually cure it rather than being a temporary workaround)

As for programs, if you're comfortable with the registry you can change where windows looks for them, otherwise you'll probably have to reinstall most of them.

[ 09-20-2005, 10:03 AM: Message edited by: Morgeruat ]

[ZFR]

Originally posted by Morgeruat: As for programs, if you're comfortable with the registry you can change where windows looks for them, otherwise you'll probably have to reinstall most of them.

There is a program that comes with Partition Magic that should do it automatically for you but...
After using it some time ago I started having problem with several programs (and Windows itself). Not sure if it was because of it or because of the partitioning itself, or something else altogether, but I ended up formatting the whole thing and reinstalling.

[Memnoch]

It's not such a big deal now as I've managed to free up a bit more space, and more importantly moved my My Documents folder (which has all the EA files). It's a bit annoying that you can't change that default Sims custom folder to something other than My Documents, eh!

[Morgeruat]

True, but like I said, it's only a temporary fix, if you're looking for a more long-term solution merging the partitions isn't a bad route to go.