Alright, so I have a hard disk with two partitions, one for Windows, one for programs.
My Windows partition has become too small and I need to enlarge it. Unfortunately, with Vista’s built-in tools, you can only add adjacent space to a partition, and you can’t move partitions.
I’ve tried GParted to make the programs partition smaller and then move the unallocated space next to the Windows partition, but the latter always fails.
If I can’t do this I’ll have to backup my programs folder and reinstall Windows, which would be near impossible since my other hard drive is nearly full and I don’t want to buy extra storage devices.
Is Windows Installed on the 1st partition?
You can’t enlarge it if there’s no unallocated space between your 1st and 2nd partition.
By using GParted:
Just resize your programs partition as to get unallocated space after it, then format this space to whatever you want (ext2,3,4;ntfs;FAT;FAT32… [although if you have files larger than 4GB then FAT is not recommended!] ntfs recommended BTW if you want to use it in Windows ).
Copy the content of your Programs partion to the newly creted one and then remove your old one. Now you should have free non formated space between the two and you can resize your Windows partition.
You might not need to copy your new Programs partiton to antoher one, just resize it on the left until it touches the Windows one (of course only if it’s a ntfs filesystem otherwise it won’t be usable in Windows… duh!).
Keep in mind this scenario applies to Windows being the 1st and Programs being the 2nd partition!
Yes, Windows is on the first partition.
The problem with copying over the files is that I’ve got less than half of the partition free, so I can’t possibly copy over everything.
Furthermore, my programs will stop working. Unless maybe I change the drive letter.
You got me thinking though, maybe in GParted I can just resize the original Programs partition to the left.
I didn’t really think it through when I used it, and just made a few changes so my Windows partition would be bigger and then let GParted execute the steps.
And you don’t have another HD you could use to backup your files? I don’t think your programs will stop working, if you follow what I suggested you would end up with the same set up as before only with a bigger windows partition.
You can only resize a partition if there’s free non-formatted space on either side of it.
When I install Windows I usually have my Windows partition and a second for all my personal Documents and Programs. I’m using a little trick to seperate User folder (Application Data, My Documents, etc…) from my Windows partition, so if you’re interested just ask.
I hope some day they present a way to do this just like you can with Linux Oses during install
First of all proceed as usual with installing Windows, when you come to the partition manager create one for Windows and one where you want your ‘User’ folder. (you can also do this with any other folder you don’t want on the Windows partition like ‘Program Files’ though personally I prefer sorting out where my apps are installed myself)
Select the Windows partition (should be the first!) and proceed with installation.
Once the first restart triggers boot from your Win CD/DVD. You come to the Install screen with Language keyboard selection > press “Next” > Now instead of hitting “Install”, use the option “Repair your Computer” > Wait until the tool is done… > It’s of no importance what Radio button is checked here, what matters is that you Cancel any operation that is performing once you click on “Next”.
If not done hit “Cancel” again and you should get to the “System Recovery Options” Screen (a pain getting there lol).
Select the Command Prompt and the fun can start.
First double check you get the drive letter for your ‘User’ partition right. type [noparse]D:[/noparse] then dir to check if it’s the right one (in the case you only created 2 partitons, 1 for Windows and 1 for ‘User’ the ‘User’ partition drive letter should generally be D )
In the command prompt type this:
robocopy C:\Users D:\Users /E /COPYALL /XJ
and hit enter (replace D by whatever drive you want the folder to be). Now it should recursively copy all files to the new location.
Double Check on the target drive all files have arrived!
Delete Source folder
rmdir /S /Q C:\Users
rmdir "C:\Documents and Settings"
Now create links to the target directories
mklink /J C:\Users D:\Users
mklink /J "C:\Documents and Settings" D:\Users
(replace D with whatever your drive letter is!)
Quit the Command Prompt and reboot. Boot from hard drive and continue the Windows installation. If you did all right Profiles, temp files, Personal documents should now be redirected to the 2nd partiton. Basically all this does is tricking Windows into redirecting the files to the 2nd partition via the means of a link.
Why’s that? Formatting should be generally quite fast with that tool or is it backing up your files that demands so much time?
Also you’re welcome
The time-consuming part is moving the new unallocated space from behind the Programs partition to the front of it (and therefore right next to the Windows partition).
I think I might have an easier solution than yours:
Go into your Users folder. In the properties of each relevant folder (Music, Videos, Pictures, whatever) there’s an “Location” tab (well my Windows is in Dutch so it might be different), where you can change the location of the folder.
If you do that it should ask if you want to move your files from the default folder location to the one you chose.
Yep that’s true but there’s also all the application data and temp that’s left. It doesn’t work all the time and some software are dependant on that precise location. There would be a way through registry editing to achieve the same thing but it’s even more complicated (well if you miss one entry you bork your whole system)! I used that option before but this trick is much more reliable.
Big advantage also is you can basically do this at any time! After 1 year even, it will work.
Well you see if you blow up your windows you just have to format the windows partition without losing all your personal stuff! If you do this via right click and location it’s only registering in the registry ( ), it gets complicated if you want to move them again. This way you can also start right away with your existing profile which is fortunately preserved on your 2nd partition.
Be careful with resizing partitions, I destroyed my partition accidentally yesterday with a little help from QTparted and the Windows 7 installer.
I just wanted to get rid of a 15gb mac OS partition and make it one big drive, I used Knoppix and everything was cool but then windows 7 thought it was a good idea to format the drive without even asking me if I was sure, all I did was press “custom install” then “start” (I just pressed enter twice and it started installing itself on top of everything, my only hint was the free space unknown at the bottom of the screen)
I didn’t even think about being able to keep your profile. That would be great. I guess I better wait with doing that until after I install Windows 7, as the profiles probably aren’t completely compatible.
I’ve cancelled operations in GParted halfway through, without any issues, so I’m not really worried.
What’s the recommended size for a Windows partition? Mine is 25GB currently, but that isn’t enough apparently :retard:
Personally I think the idea of multiple partitions on a single drive is stupid, I’d rather have multiple drives so if I want to bring all of my movies to another PC I remove one drive, or if I want to let my friend try some of my games I just remove another one. And the windows drive should be the biggest, I had almost 300GB of crap on my desktop.
Keeping Windows in its own partition has many benefits, like being able to reinstall Windows without having to back up.
You could just make a shortcut to a folder with all that crap. Or you could use popsUlfr’s method to have desktop files saved on another partition.
But if just that one partition got fucked up, you could lose all your other partitions, and you would still have to reinstall windows, I’ve done it both ways and I’ve decided that partitions are not my thing, but multiple drives are just fine.
Although I also do the dual partition thing, you should definitely think of getting a high speed, low capacity, drive for your windows installation.
If you want a really easy way to manage your partitions buy* yourself a copy of Paragon Partition Manager. It’s an excellent program that simplifies everything down to nothing, and has an excellent boot time interface.
That’s really weird, you’re sure you didn’t click too fast? I always stop by at the partition screen and double check what’s going on there.
I’ve a 30GB Windows Partition right now, and there’s only 10GB left lol of course I’ve a huge pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys and I could reduce one and delete the other but I’m not bothered right now. (there’s a way to get rid of hiberfil.sys so…)
The only problem I had over the years was a messed up Master Boot Record and that was due to my own stupidity… Though the partition table could get destroyed (I think? Never happened to me) there’s surely a way to restore it.
Of course it’s best to install it to different Hard drives, but if you don’t have that many to work with you have to resort to other means. I’m using one for my Windows and another one for Linux. On Linux it’s a good idea to have multiple partitions for /boot /home /var , especially if you build your own system.
The Gnome partition tool is really a powerful and handy tool to be honest, there’s another Linux one which Name I don’t remember but it comes with the Fedora distro. I have more faith in some Uni* tools to manage my hardware than proprietary closed-source madness
Alright, finally managed to resize my Windows partition to 40GB. An error came up, but it was easily fixed with the Windows CD (used a Windows 7 cd to fix my Vista installation :retard . No more slow downs on my Vista installation, yay.
Would it be a good idea to split my second hard drive (the one where I keep my files) into two partitions, one for an Ubuntu installation, and the second for my files?
Edit: I installed Windows 7. I accidentally my whole My Documents folder :fffuuu:
Anyone know a good program to recover deleted files?
Edit 2: Using Undelete PLUS. This going to take ages T_T
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