Partitioning Problem

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Guest

I am running XP SP2 on one of my machines at work. When I attempt to use
Disk Management to create a second partition of the C-drive (the drive is
more than half empty), tt indicates that the entire drive is taken up by the
original partition, and I get no option to make a second partition. I am
logged on as Administrator.

Do you have any idea what is blocking my attempt to make a second partition?
 
You will need a third party utility like Partition Magic, Acronis Disk
Director
or BootIt Next Gen which has a free trial.

BootIt: http://www.bootitng.com/
Acronis:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/partitioning.html
Partition Magic:
http://www.powerquest.com/home_homeoffice/products/overview.jsp?pcid=sp&pvid=pm80

As always backup any important data files (documents, photos, music, etc.),
before using such a tool as there is always a small chance that something
can go wrong.

Better still backup you entire C: partition to an external drive
or a second internal drive. You can use Acronis True Image to do this.

JS
 
John said:
I am running XP SP2 on one of my machines at work. When I attempt to
use
Disk Management to create a second partition of the C-drive (the drive
is
more than half empty), tt indicates that the entire drive is taken up
by the
original partition, and I get no option to make a second partition. I
am
logged on as Administrator.
Click to expand...


A partition that is empty is NOT an unused section of that partition.
That space is still allocated for use within that partition. No utility
has ever been provided with any version of Windows that lets you resize
or move partitions. You will need to use a 3rd party program to reduce
the size of the partition that is currently using all of the hard
drive's capacity and then create a new partition in the newly
unallocated disk space. Ranish Partition Manager is free but I've never
used it as I still have an old version of PartitionMagic.


By the way, when munging your e-mail address, FIRST munge the domain.
Stop energizing spambots to target a valid domain and wasting their
resources to report to the sending mail server that no such account
exists (but it could exist by that username if someone else had it so
you end up sending the spam to their account). Munging should always
include the domain, and munge to a domain that is known NOT to be
registered (don't just ping it but do a domain lookup to check that no
one has that domain name registered). Munging the domain is far more
important and considerate than munging your username. You can munge
both but munging just the domain is sufficient.
 
Windows has never included the capability to resize partitions without data
loss.
There are many third party applications that allow you to resize partitions
without data loss.
If you have to ask, you probably should have help making changes to the
partitions.
If your HDD REALLY has unallocated space (that means space that is not
already part of a partition), you can boot from the XP CD and during
prepping for installation, make the unallocated space into a partition. But
be very very careful, messing with the wrong partition could result in the
need for a complete reinstallation. Many OEMs have a partition on the HDD
specifically for restoring the machine to factory condition (as far as the
software environment goes). If you delete that, you will lose the ability to
do a system recovery.

If you have created a new partition, once you boot back to XP, just go to My
Computer, double click the newly created partition & XP will tell you, This
disk is not formatted, would you like to format it now. Once formatted, the
partition should be useable.
 
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