Considering repartitioning

Rmp5s

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I have a Dell Inspiron 1500 series laptop with a full hdd. When I look at my drive though, the usable hdd space is ~1.7gb while the "recovery" side of the drive has ~6gb free. I've decided to try this:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-gparted-to-resize-your-windows-vista-partition/

I found my Vista disk and booted from it to make sure it will work for the job. I made the live disk with the tool on it last night. I'm ready to go. I was just wondering how risky this is? It's the wife's computer and she'd be quite angry if a bunch of stuff got erased or something...as would I.

Any help appreciated! Thanks!

--Brent
 
Hi,

I think that GParted is a great tool to use. I use it in all my partitioning endeavors. To the question about how risky is it, the answer is, that if you back everything up then it won't be that risky. I would recommend finding a quality backup program that you can back up things to an external hdd or dvds. That way you won't have to worry about loosing it when you do the partitioning.

Also, I like that guide, from just browsing it the screenshots are good and the directions seem firm.

Cheers!
 
Very nice.

Since I don't have access to an external hdd (I was going to buy one for my wife for Christmas but ran out of money...this is my amends in a sense...) and don't have any cds that would work for this, I think I'm just going to wing it. I have a good feeling about it and, with the directions on that site, I feel very confident. I'll let everyone know how it goes! Thanks!
 
Good luck backing up is the safest if you haven't partitioned before. But hopefully it works out for you.

Cheers!
 
Well...I "learned instead of following directions."...well, rather I "learned BY following directions". Good quote.

Anyway...I ended up with good news and bad news...I always get the bad out of the way first:

Bad - I didn't get the intended C drive any bigger. Gparted worked FLAWLESSLY but, be it my fault or not, only flawlessly shrank the recovery drive...

I ran Gparted and all went as planned. I shrank the recovery drive, drive D, to make room for enlarging the target drive, drive C. When it finished, I rebooted and all that and windows ran fine...but, instead of having a smaller D drive and a larger C drive, I only had a smaller D drive and there was no change to the C drive. No biggie...I'll just go back in and make C bigger. After scanning the drives so Gparted would do its thing again, I got it going on making C bigger using the space that was taken from D. It makes it almost all the way to the end and stops with an error message.

Now I'm left with the same C drive I had, a smaller D drive and a "ghost" drive that only Gparted sees...what do I do now? lol

...oh...the good news is that the computer still runs just fine...:-D

--Brent
 
Hi,

What is the error message that you got? You don't have a third drive that only GParted can see I think that it is just unallocated space that can be put somewhere.

Cheers!
 
did it restart to make the partition bigger?
it cant do it when booted into windows.
 
Hi,

What is the error message that you got? You don't have a third drive that only GParted can see I think that it is just unallocated space that can be put somewhere.

Cheers!

I don't remember the exact error message...it was quite long.

That's exactly what it is...unallocated space. Gparted sees it as a "third drive" of sorts...Vista doesn't see the space at all...it just sees drive D is smaller. When I go back into Gparted and try to allocate that space to drive C, it gets all the way to the end and throws an error message.

I need to find out why it won't allocate that newly created free space into Drive C. I'll try it again in a few and I'll post the error messages it gives as best I can.
 
If the recovery partition is at the beginning of the drive followed by C you would first have to use GParted to move the C primary towards the front to first fill in the now vacant drive space before you can expand it out towards the rear of the drive afterwards. That's all it will take for that.
 
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