No need for partition managers anymore

[Midway]

I came across something I didn't know about when I was reinstalling Vista. Vista has a built-in partition manager that performs non-destructive resizing of partitions. I used to use Partition Magic to do this.

[CrowdAds]

[Znod]

Yes, and it works very well too. One more thing--the Disk Managment help file is very good too.

[Midway]

I bought an OEM Western Digital 250GB drive that had a small extra partition on it. I assume this was for something like Dell's diagnostic partition or a restore partition. I deleted it and used Expand to "take over" the unused space for C:.

[Snuffy]

Some times that space is auto reserved so that the HD is formatted ready to install a OS... if only for data then REMOVE and enjoy the extra...
some times this is used as "spooler space", sometimes this is used for RESTORE purposes,
many 3rd party partition managers needed to preform the DOS functions to add, edit, delete, change, and allowed you to do this to the MASTER Partition where the OS is installed... without this that partition can not be changed...

[jerrybasham]

Originally Posted by Snuffy

Some times that space is auto reserved so that the HD is formatted ready to install a OS... if only for data then REMOVE and enjoy the extra...
some times this is used as "spooler space", sometimes this is used for RESTORE purposes,
many 3rd party partition managers needed to preform the DOS functions to add, edit, delete, change, and allowed you to do this to the MASTER Partition where the OS is installed... without this that partition can not be changed...

Say, Snuffy, I was just wondering about that.. I just
acquired a new notebook with Premium on it as OEM.

When I went in and looked at the way the 120Gb disk was
set up I was surprised to see that it is basically partitioned
in half, with one, "C," as the drive with all the files on it and
the otherm "D," called "Data" and with nothing on it except
a 91Mb file called "System Volume Information."

There is also a Recycle Bin on both partitions and "eData,"
on "D." They are both empty.

I want my whole 120Gb hard drive for the OS. I can't make
that happen because the partitioner won't let me, showing an
error message when I try, "Access Denied."

Any ideas?

-- Jerry

[edit] This was resolved quite easily.. I should have looked
around a bit before posting; it was just a matter of actually
deleting the "D" partition after backing up the files on it.
Then I extended "C" to cover the whole disk (except for
the boot area).

[Snuffy]

The Data partition is where your ACER Restore is located...so unless you have the Disks from ACER for a Original Restore from ACER...or your own Vista DVD (Acer sent me the required DISK(s) for Factory Install)... then I'd simply shrink the DATA partition down.(.PS: hint - use view to show all hidden files.... and WOW wonder what is in D:\DATA...)... to a smaller size, then increase the C:\ up... I mainly use the Data partition for all my DOWNLOADS, and keep all my emails there... so incase you have to RESTORE via EManager, you have all your DL's and all your EMails.."Vista's Disk Manager" is very good at that....

[jerrybasham]

Thanks for the reply.

I just moved everything from "D" to "C" in a special folder, then deleted the
partition and extended "C" to cover the disk.

Half the 120Gb disk for restore? Amazing.

[ProCookie]

Yeah thats a great utiltiy i used it to split my hard drive up for mutiple OS booting

[dazzlin]

Now, see, I don't get it. I'm in stupid mode today. I did a shrink today on C: drive which showed 1453 MB, and chose 1000 MB as the shrink size...thinking that C: would shrink to 1000 MB, leaving me with 453 MB free to partition as another drive. I thought wrong. It created 1000 MB free to partition. Now this worried me... why? Because that would mean it left 453 MB on C:, and C: uses more than that currently for its data. So, would this mean it would delete the rest? Because I could never really figure it out, I undid the shrink and went back to just the one partition.

So...no...the help docs weren't all that helpful to me. Go figure.

[ewan_mclean]

I too have used this tool to install Windows XP on another partition and it works brilliantly, before if I wanted to install another OS, I had to reformat and do a partition before setup. I split my HDDs into 100 and 86GB (186GB HDD)

[felix8406]

Just like Ewan, I've used this utility as well with excellent result, though it does require a little bit of thinking before executing or one can end up with the issue that Dazzlin encountered.