Can I Change Disk Partitions?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill Erdman
  • Start date Start date
B

Bill Erdman

I am on a Dell Latitude Desktop with Windows 2000 V.5
running. When I installed Windows I repeated the basic
Win NT disk partitions that were on it when I got it:
C: 2GB FAT
D: 15GB NTFS
now, of course my C drive is full just with basic windows,
office and Internet Explorer overhead so I am constantly
getting "not enough disk space" errors from many programs.

Can I re-configure, or re-partition to a larger C: and
smaller D: without completely re-installing Win2000?

Bill
 
Hi, Bill.

The short answer is that you have two choices. Either:

1. Invest your time: Backup; repartition and reformat; restore, or

2. Invest your money: Buy a third-party utility, such as PowerQuest's
Partition Magic (about $70).

In the process, you probably should switch C: to NTFS unless you plan to
install Win9x/ME on this machine. If you reformat, that's easy. If you
don't reformat C:, it's also easy, but Win2K's convert.exe usually results
in 512-byte clusters, rather than the default 4 KB clusters produced by a
reformat. Small clusters use disk space more efficiently, but larger
clusters give faster performance.

I have no experience with a Dell laptop, so you might want to check with the
other Dell users in the Usenet newsgroup alt.sys.pc-clone.dell for any
quirks specific to Dell.

RC
 
Hi, Gary - and Bill.
If your new disk is more than 32 gig you will need to use FDISK from ME
to format it for > 32 Gig.
Click to expand...

Use FDISK IF you want that >32 GB volume to be formatted FAT32. Win2K/XP
will happily format much larger volumes as NTFS.

RC
 
Yeah .. bad assumption on my part. You can GHOST an image to a DVD, CD, or
disk, but the disk will have be either FAT or FAT32 since it must be
accessible to DOS.
 
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