Can I resize my partitions in XP?
 

I recently put another HD in my laptop. I screwed up and the main windows parttion is only like 20GB out of 250GB. I am looking to try out Windows 7, and was wondering if there is a way to easily resize the partitions on the fly, or if I should just do a clean install.

I was hoping to dual boot, but I'm not tied into it.

I would recommend EASEUS Partition Master
Worked quickly and easily to fix the monster single partition that shipped with my new Vista system; that is broken into four much more reasonable chunks now. Have to like the free price tag for home use as well.

Use Gparted..very simple, recommended by several sites to non-destructively resize. I did it to split my drive for 7 on my XP pc.

Yes you can. Despite the recommendations given here and my lack of knowledge in how the other software applications work, I would have to tell you to go with the master itself and pick partition Magic. I have used it on the very reason your writing on three occasions and it only failed me once because the second time the MBR was gone!! But overall I like it. It was intended for this kind of work and it works!!

i done't like xp

I've heard that Partition Magic works fine, but it's never as clean as a total reformat and Windows reinstall.

Out of curiosity, how did you want the drive to be partitioned? I often make my Windows partition ~20GB and create a second larger partition for programs/games. Just a personal preference, but you can definitely continue to run Windows just fine if you format the rest of the drive as a second partition.

My HDD is set up something like this: | Windows Vista, 20GB | Windows 7, 20GB | Programs/Games/Media, 250GB |

Wrex, i will probably run a setup like the one you have.

I will take the plunge to Win7 tonight if I can.

I second the vote on Partition Magic, I've used it dozens of times in many versions of windows an have never had a problem except once. Wasn't PM's fault that time was my own for not paying attention an resizing the wrong hdd by mistake.:thumbsup:

After much fiddling about, I finally just decided to do a fresh install, onlt to get the dual boot option. Like it so far, gotta get some finetuning done...

off to the windows 7 thread.

Windows 7 and Windows Vista also have built in partition resize tools, although somewhat limited. You can find the partition option during the custom installation, you don't even need to go through with the whole installation to use it.

I did run into an issue trying to make the first partition larger on my disk, it would let me shrink the second partition but I could not enlarge the first to fill in the extra space, but I wasn't able to do this with ANY partition software for some reason, so this may have been a special case.

edit: you can also partition your drives while using Vista or 7, just go to disk management and there are options to shrink and extend the volume.

As an update, I just used the disk management tool built into Windows 7. Pretty nice utility thrown in with the OS..not amazing, but it works and it's free!