PARTITIONING VISTA

  • Thread starter Thread starter WILLIAM ALBURY
  • Start date Start date
WILLIAM ALBURY said:
CAN YOU PARTITION "C" DRIVE WITHOUT FORMATTING?
Click to expand...

Yes try using Acronis Disk Director. You have to have Windows installed
first though.
 
Dave Boomhauer said:
Yes try using Acronis Disk Director. You have to have Windows installed
first though.
Click to expand...

Actually don't think it supports Vista so check first!!
 
"C" drive gets the letter from the operating system.
You can't change a partition containing the operating system without using
third party software.
You boot to the third party software and change the partition.

Formatting adds the file system to a partition.
A partition is not usable by an operating system without being formatted.

You need to explain what you want to do.
--
Ronald Sommer

: CAN YOU PARTITION "C" DRIVE WITHOUT FORMATTING?
:
: --
: BILL
 
Disk Management in Vista allows for shrinking, creating and extending. It
also does work on the 'C' boot/system drive. No need for third-party
applications. Defrag first.
 
And it actually works quite well. I resized my 80 gig partition D: to 60
gig. I then expanded my 20 gig partition C: to 40 gig. Finding it was more
than I needed, I downsized Partition C: to 30 gig.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
You did this in Vista? On my laptop, it won't let me shrink my Vista
partition down smaller than about 50 GB, and I'm only using 11 GB. It says
that the amount of space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are
enabled. I know I can't do anything about the pagefiles, but I can't seem to
find out if snapshots are enabled, and if so, how to disable them (even if
temporarily).
 
Use the command prompt on the Vista install disk. The volume won't be
locked and you can delete the pagefile, and run diskpart and see what
options are available.
 
Thanks for the advice, but unfortunately it didn't work. I had hope for it
too, because I thought maybe the pagefile was at the end of the partition and
that was stopping me from shrinking C:\ any further.

Here's an abbreviated list of what I did (there was a lot more fumbling
around with the commands) when I got to the command prompt:
dir /A:H C:\
del /A:H C:\pagefile.sys
diskpart
select (disk, volume, and partition)
shrink querymax

And it said something like:
Maximum reclaimable space: 0 B

Is there anything else (that doesn't cost anything other than time) I can do
to shrink this thing further? As a last resort I've got the latest beta of
the GParted Live CD, which supposedly safely repartitions drives with Vista,
but I'd prefer to have Vista to shrink itself.
 
Glad to know that it does not destroy data -- that used not to be the
case with MS partitioning, although I never tried it since I've been
using PM since I don't remember when.

In fact I used PM8 to set up my empty hard drive with two partitions
into one of which I've installed VISTA.

Any news of PM8 VISTA updates?

Any experience of freeware partitioning tools?
 
You did this in Vista? On my laptop, it won't let me shrink my Vista
partition down smaller than about 50 GB, and I'm only using 11 GB. It says
that the amount of space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are
enabled. I know I can't do anything about the pagefiles, but I can't seem to
find out if snapshots are enabled, and if so, how to disable them (even if
temporarily).
Click to expand...
You can move the page file to a different partition if you have one.
 
Would seem likely it is the snapshot files then that are the problem. I
don't know if Vista's defrag program would run or move them from the DVD,
after deleting the pagefile again, I believe both diskeeper and perfectdisk
have 30 day trials, but again don't know if they move them. I understand
that at the moment that perfectdisk is destroying restore points when it's
run. I'd also be concerned about the other snapshots that may be affected.
Vistas is dfrgui.exe if you want to give it a try. Losing the volsnap files
is something I lose each time I boot into XP anyway but I do backups and
don't rely on them.
 
"I understand that at the moment that perfectdisk is destroying restore
points when it's run."

Same issue as seen in MS KB
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;312067. Not
everybody will see it. Depends on the cluster size of the drive, how much
space volsnap has allocated on the disk for stuff, how many restore points
are on the drive, how much data changes on the drive. Solution is to format
the drive with a cluster size being a multiple of 16k.

We are trying to get MS to update this KB article to reflect Vista as well
or to create a new KB article specifically for Vista.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.
 
I have been reading every thing I can find on the subject of partition
management in Vista because I need to resize my C: partition to make it
larger. I did an upgrade from Windows 2000 Pro. to Vista Ultimate thinking
that I would be given the opportunity to increase the partition size during
the installation process but of course that didn't happen. Now I have Vista
installed on a 34 Gig partition that is fast filling up as I add back
applications. The drive in question is a 120 GB unit with 3 partitions
C:(34GB), G:(54GB) and H(32GB). I have tried shrinking the G: partition
adjacent to C: and that is possible but after doing that step the "Extend"
command remains grayed out for C:. Admittedly I didn't actually finish the
"Shrink" process and that may well be the reason that Extend remains grayed
for the C: drive.

I also have a couple of large drives on the computer that were formatted as
single partitions before Vista was installed. When I try to shrink these
partitions (250GB and 320GB) the wizard shows that there is no space
available for shrinking so I can't do any thing with them, at least not from
inside Windows.

I wonder if you could give me some more specific help on how to proceed in
Extending my C: drive. I feel like I will be able to get around the
repartitioning of the two large drives but the C: drive has me somewhat
stymied.
 
C. Britton said:
I have been reading every thing I can find on the subject of partition
management in Vista because I need to resize my C: partition to make it
larger. I did an upgrade from Windows 2000 Pro. to Vista Ultimate thinking
that I would be given the opportunity to increase the partition size during
the installation process but of course that didn't happen. Now I have
Vista
installed on a 34 Gig partition that is fast filling up as I add back
applications. The drive in question is a 120 GB unit with 3 partitions
C:(34GB), G:(54GB) and H(32GB). I have tried shrinking the G: partition
adjacent to C: and that is possible but after doing that step the "Extend"
command remains grayed out for C:. Admittedly I didn't actually finish the
"Shrink" process and that may well be the reason that Extend remains grayed
for the C: drive.

I also have a couple of large drives on the computer that were formatted as
single partitions before Vista was installed. When I try to shrink these
partitions (250GB and 320GB) the wizard shows that there is no space
available for shrinking so I can't do any thing with them, at least not from
inside Windows.

I wonder if you could give me some more specific help on how to proceed in
Extending my C: drive. I feel like I will be able to get around the
repartitioning of the two large drives but the C: drive has me somewhat
stymied.
Click to expand...


I hate to be a spoil-sport, but the term "partitioning Vista" is a complete
misuse of both words, as well as the English language.
Vista is an operating system. One doesn't partition an operating system, he
partitions a hard drive.

A proper English grammatical construction would be "How does one partition a
hard drive from within Vista?"

Donald McDaniel
 
Oh thank you so much professor McDoodle. With all that information I am now
prepared to resolve my problems. I promise never to submit another poorly
constructed sentence, so please don't hit me any more.
 
Hi Jane,

I am in need of some professional guidance on this subject of partition/disk
management in Vista.

I had three partitions on a 120 GB hard drive that has Vista Ultimate
installed in the first (C) partition. Yesterday I deleted the second
partition on the drive leaving a 50+ GB area of free space thinking I would
be able to extend the C partition now that I had free space to do so. I
tried to no avail to extend C. The problem is that the Extend command
remains grayed out in the action menu. Thinking it might be a permissions
problem I went into Local Security Policy, User Rights Assignments and gave
my account (the quasi Administrative thing) permissions to perform volume
manintenance tasks. Unfortunately that didn't do anything positive as far as
the Extend command was concerned.

I started playing around with the Command line approach using "Diskpart" but
found the information about using the command to be lacking in depth and
examples. I visited the MSDN pages and found a more in depth discussion but
I hit a mental wall when that page called for using the Size= and Drive No.=
parameters with Diskpart. The part I don't understand is "Drive No." When I
use the "List volume" command I see partitions listed with both numbers and
drive letters. I assume the web page is talking about virtual
drive/partition numbers when it says to construct the command as "Diskpart
Size=n Drive No=x" but since I'm getting ready to resize the partition that
contains my OS I don't want to go on assumption.

Now after all that I have to ask the question of why does the Extend command
remain grayed out for the C drive and not for the other partitions and what
can I do to make it available?

Anything you can offer to straighten me out will be appreciated.
 
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