partitioning question

[panther309]

i need to format my pc but have 50 gigs of movies on it. would it be possible to split my HD into roughly 2 parts?

my movie partition ~50gb
the rest of the HD, which would be my 'new primary' partition ~100gb

i would need to do this without losing any of my movies. and then reinstall windows on the second, larger, partition.

possible? if so, how? thanks!

 

[Pirotech]

yep, you may do it.
the way that would be the most simple imho is:
1) you need any partitioning software. Personally I use Disk Director. If you don't want to pay I know also Ranish partition manager but I haven't tried it. Honestly, I don't trust to free disk tools, they may cause bugs indeed, whereas I suppose my data to cost much more. So, using any partition software you may split your drive into two parts: the first partition is to be 100gb and the second one for 50gb.
2) copy your videos and music to the new 50gb partition.
3) boot from the Windows installation CD, format your old 100 gb partition (or you may format using the same Disk Director by booting from its bootable CD) and install the new OS to the 100 gb partition.

One more remark: some problems may accures if you make the first drive be 100gb and the second one for 50 gb. If the bootable drive is not C:, some soft may not want to install on it.
So maybe it would be better to

 

[Navid]

There are programs that you can use to resize a partition and create new partitions. But, you should always backup your data before using such programs.

Do you not have another hard drive?
Then, you can just copy all your movies to the second hard drive; split the first one and do whatever you want with it to set it up the way you like and then copy the movies back to it.

If you do not backup first, you will be taking a chance of losing all of your movies. Nothing may go wrong. But, something may!

 

[bendixG15]

If those movies are important to you, then you should get them off the hard drive and onto DVDs. Or get a second hard drive and use it for backup.

That hard drive is going to fail someday and you will loose it all.