[pizzaisgood14]

Ok im sure you have been asked this a million times but i really need help partiotioning my drive and dont really understand how. What i want to do is take my 200 gb hard drive and make a 30 gb backup partition on it. Right now there is a c partion wich is the main one and recovery parttion labeled d. Now in the microsft support center it says all you have to do is right click on the c drive in computer mangement and click create partition.But now i dont see that when i right click i see this

http://i198.photobuc...gpartition1.jpg

in this picture you can also see the partitions already in my drive. am i even right clicking on the right thing here. thanks.

[jbking]

My suggestion would be to look at software that will let you resize a partition so that the C: partition you have now becomes smaller so that there is room to create a new partition as there isn't any free space to do that on the drive. Once you shrink that primary partition then you could likely create another partition to have as a backup or whatever.

JB

[mphenterprises]

Hi Pizza. We all thought the Windows Disk Management was just to maintain and organize partitions already established. None of us realized that it could actually create partitions. All that changed when GearGE came to us and explained exactly how to do it. Please follow the steps laid out within this Document. This should be all you need to create a partition.




If you have any problems, please post and let us know.

[smax013]

mphenterprises said:

Hi Pizza. We all thought the Windows Disk Management was just to maintain and organize partitions already established. None of us realized that it could actually create partitions. All that changed when GearGE came to us and explained exactly how to do it. Please follow the steps laid out within this Document|d-1196#cf]. This should be all you need to create a partition.

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> If you have any problems, please post and let us know.
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While I could be wrong (it bound to happen sooner or later ;-)), I don't believe the Windoze Disk Management can resize partitions non-destructively. I believe the only option is to delete the partition (and everything on it) and then recreate new partitions of the size you want.





If you want to resize existing partitions (i.e. the drive is partitioned and formatted and has data on it), then I believe you need a program like [PartitionMagic or GParted, etc.

[piyushsingh]

U cannot create new partitions from windows disk management from previous partitions , u have to delete and reformat a drive to make partitions.
In vista u can resize partitions easily but not in XP.
u will have to use 3rd party softwares to do this .

[mphenterprises]

"To create a new partition right-click on rectangle reprizenting unallocated space and chose "New Partition..."






As much as I am dredding Smax doing his "I told you so dance," :-) According to the Document, the only way to create a new partition using the generic Windows Disk Management utility is to have unallocated space available.

Smax, you and I tout PartitionMagic and GParted all the time. Why didn't I just stick to my guns? LOL :D




Pizza, I concur with Smax and Piyushsingh. For your particular situation, you have no choice but to either:

- Buy Partition Magic at $70

OR

- Download GParted for free and create a Live CD

[smax013]

mphenterprises said:

As much as I am dredding Smax doing his "I told you so dance," :-)

Yeah! I get to do the "I told you so" dance! :^0 It is almost as fun as the "this is a good football weekend" dance (Michigan won, Notre Dame lost http://to Navy...hehe, Lions won...now just have to hope that the Steelers "hold serve"). :-)

[pizzaisgood14]

i looked at that document and it looks like its easy is you have unaloocated space. how do you even get a unallocated space in the first place? is there something you have to do when installing windows to say how big the c partition should be and then you can have that unacollated space. thanks for the responces.

[mphenterprises]

Hi Pizza. Well, here's the thing. The easiest way to partition your hard drive without data loss is to use Partition Magic. Yes, it cost $70 but, as Smax and myself will tell you, it is one of the best $70 we could have spent for our computers. It is always a good idea to back up your important data before using Partition Magic but I have never had an issue while using this utility.

The Gparted Live .iso which would become the Live CD is good; however, it is primarily used within Linux and even still you would not necessarily have to use it.

A reinstallation would create one large unpartitioned space and then you could use the default Windows Disk Management utility to create the necessary partitions you want. However, the drawback of this option would be that you would have to reinstall everything, Operating System, drivers, applications, everything.

[jbking]

I have used Acronis Disk Director to resize the partition on my laptop before for another product one could use to shrink a partition though I would strongly urge a back-up before doing so as anytime one changes the hard drive funny things may happen

On installing the O/S is where you can leave unallocated space if you want. Of course years ago there were issues with having more than 4 GB in one partition in NT 4.0 though that was about 10 years I learned that issue.

JB

[rgreen4]

Pizza - in Vista, if you right click the active partition you should get a pull down menu with an option to resize the partition?
You can resize partitions in Vista on the fly, even the boot partition. I have done it many times, primarily in response to a thread started by Lilxkid24 some time back. Since I run smaller drives with data storage separate, I don't partition drives very often.
I am at work right now, and coming to this discussion late. This evening, if no other solution has proven effective, I will go through it again and post back. In the meantime, here is the link to the discussion that Lilxkid24 started when he was having problems with partitioning. It is a bit long, but the discussion on the procedure of expanding and shrinking volumes in Vista is on the second page.
Now, all that being said, there is one difference between the partitions I was working on, and the one you were is the fact that you have the HP recovery partition that is FAT32 and not NTFS. This could make a difference. When I get home from work tonight, I will see if I get the same response on my HP laptop which still has the recovery partition on it (its the only on of my machines with Vista that still does).

[rgreen4]

Pizza - on my HP laptop with Vista, I was able to right click on the drive (w/ operating and recovery partitions) and shrink the C: volume by 10GB. I then had 56GB as C:, 8GB as D: and 10GB unallocated. I then expanded the C: volume to where C: is now back to 66GB. One difference is that my recovery partition is formatted as NTFS, and your is apparently formatted as FAT32. That factor could be keeping Vista from being able to shrink your C: volume.

Your posting does not contain any information on the system you are using. It is curious that the original formatting of your drive is mixed.