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I'm Cheap - Need free disk / partition resize software

T

thatsright

Diamond Member
I have my main rig running Win XP and it was installed FIVE YEARS AGO!! The pc is fine for most activities. But in the last two years it has a penchant for explorer.exe to crash. Always when I am in Windows Explorer or My Computer working on my Nikon camera files or other pictures. To hell with troubleshooting, its time to wipe it down and start over.

I have two hard drives. Drive 1 is five years old and has C: D:, and E; Drive 2 is about 3 years old and has F: and G: partitions. I?d like to wipe down C: and create a new C: drive on my second physical hard drive. Doing this as its ?newer? and Drive 1 seems likely to fail before Drive 2. But to create a new C: partition, I will need to resize and create a new partition on Drive two.

Anyone knows of a free utility/program (not partition magic, etc) that will let me do non-destructive partition resizing and creation?
 
Seems there are a few:

Part

I don't think I'd want to be "Cheap Charlie" in such an area. 🙂
 
That may be true in some cases. But for this type of job, I would go with a well respected name that has been around,
tested and gotten decent reviews. Personally I like Partition Magic (not free) although some folks have allegedly had issues
with it. Usually in my view, user caused.
 
Personally I wouldn't really consider paying for one since you should do a backup before anyway so if the free software f's up your filesystem you just recreate it at the new size and restore your data and move on.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Personally I wouldn't really consider paying for one since you should do a backup before anyway so if the free software f's up your filesystem you just recreate it at the new size and restore your data and move on.
Click to expand...

likewise.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
The idea that paying for software gets you higher quality is so wrong that it's not funny.
Click to expand...

That's not what I said - I was speaking about my own preference in this area accompanied by a wry smile. 🙂

I have used several of these packages, - PM 8 was my standard - but now Acronis Disk Director Suite is way more powerful.
 
I have used several of these packages, - PM 8 was my standard - but now Acronis Disk Director Suite is way more powerful.
Click to expand...

I've never used Acronis but I used PM8 back in the day and there was a reason that many people called it Partition Tragic. I'm all Linux at home now and rarely do anything like that with the few Windows machines I use at work so I haven't had a reason to look at commercial tools again.
 
You probably have everything you need, but it would be a bit easier with something like partition commander.

Presumably you will make drive 2 the main (ie, primary) drive as Drive 1 has too many miles on it.

1. Copy F and G files to drive 1 (these should be data files and this is temporary so it is OK to do this). (Note: As an option, after copying files over, you could boot into WINXP on drive 1 and deleted all volumes on drive 2).

2. Make Drive 2 primary master

3. Install WINXP on drive 1 as FAT32. At the time of install you will be allowed to specify the partition size for C.

4. Use a WIN98 or WINME start up disk to make C non-bootable

5. Install original primary and slave drive configuration. Boot into old WINXP and format the remaining empty space on drive 2 as NTFS.

6. Copy over your files from F and G on drive 1 to drive 2.

7. Make newer drive 2 primary and throw drive 1 away. (Note: If you want to still use your original drive 1 and it is NTFS then you need a utility to make the old C drive non-bootable or else ensure that it is off line).

8. Use WIN98/ME startup disk to re-toggle WINXP C partition to active/bootable.

9. Boot into WINXP and use the convert tool to convert FAT32 to NTFS.
 
Gparted. Many Linux live cds will come with it (ubuntu for example) and it will partition windows partitions (and just about any other file system) while giving you a full desktop environment to browse the net or something in. It's a bit slow though, but works fantastically.
 
yup u better have backups.
even pay software is not without risks. this is not something you do with stuff you can't lose.

 
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