Partioning on IBM T42 laptop systems

[Shaftatplanetquake]

My organization has about 25 IBM T42s that are slow. The slowness comes mostly from the hard drives.

I've purchased a few 7200 RPM drives which have higher capacity than the 40 Gig (5400rpm) drives which come with these. I want to expand the primary, active partition which contains windows to the (full capacity of the disk) minus (size of the recovery partition). There is a smaller partition on the end of the original disk which contains recovery information that allows a recovery to be performed. I am trying to allow the recovery partition to still function while expanding the capacity of the other partition.

I have yet to find a utility that will do this with a single command.

I have a few utilities that will do a very fast (less than 20 minutes) copy of the entire file system but the partitions are the same as they were on the old system with unused space tacked on the end of the other 2 partitions.

I have followed through with partition resize/move/merge utilities in the past and have been successful but this has been too time consuming and I have actually been unable to replicate my steps (don't know which software I used and I've been trying other utilities) for the past 2 days.

If someone has a one step utility for me to be able to do what I'm trying to do, I'd be happy. I have the adapters to plug the laptop drives directly into the IDE chain on a desktop that is plenty fast. I can use windows utilities or utilites that boot off of a CD. Windows is installed on a SATA hard drive in this system and functional. I can even set up a dual boot and poot a linux distro on there if needed.

 

[corkyg]

I just did that on a new Thinkpad T60 - but with Vista. Vista lets you shrink or expand partitions, and create them if there is resulting unallocated space.

I use Acronis TrueImage 10.4942 to create a bootable full program CDR. Then I boot to that with the old and new drives connected. Use the clone function, and when going from smaller to larger, use the PROPORTIONAL method and all partitions will be proportionally scaled to the new disk size.

The recovery partition on the T60 is not visible in any software I have except PerfectDisk and Acronis. It is an EISA partition and is in FRONT of the main C:\ drive partition. It has more than recovery ware in it - it contains all of the Thinkvantage utilities as well.

I don't know of any one step utiulity that will do the several steps you need to do. The proportional cloning does it, but it involves several steps through choices, however it does it in one operation.