Can GParted LiveCD will do this?

So, does anyone have any experience in EXPANDING their Windows partition? I've got two partitions on an old computer here, and would like it to be just one. The Windows is an XP NTFS and the other is a blank partition, freshly formatted and NTFS. Is there anyway to shrink the blank partition? I finally found that GParted could resize drives, but mainly people were trying to shrink their Windows drive. So I was more curious about expanding it so it would take up the entire disk.

Thanks all.

 

Hi Sosaiso,

I haven't used it yet, but it says it can grow NTFS partitions as well.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

Make a good back up before (at least your data).

 

sosaiso,

Here is a link to a gparted tutorial "HOW TO RESIZE PARTITION":

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/resize/resizing.htm

The example actually deals with increasing the size of an NTFS partition.

Do you want to delete the blank NTFS partition or shrink it prior to resizing the Windows system partition? Either way, you will probably need to do this before expanding the system partition.

Microsoft has a Disk Management utility that can delete a partion if that is what you need to do. But it cannot be used to shrink a partition or expand the system partition. To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management. Bring up help and search for 'deleting partition'. Then follow the directions.

I would also recommend, if you want to continue to use the existing XP installation and are not planning on a reinstall, that you create an image of the system partition prior to expanding it (just in case something goes wrong). You could download a 30-day trial of Terabyte Unlimited's Image for DOS (or Image for Linux) to do this. Store the created image on DVDs or an external hard drive, whichever you choose. If the resizing is successful, just get rid of the image as it is no good after 30 days. If it is not successful, you can restore the image you created onto the hard drive. Here is Terabyte's URL:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

Good luck!

bktII

 

Thank you all for the quick responses.

I just finished trying out the resizing. For some reason, everytime I tried to resize my c: drive, there would be an error, stopping me from expanding the drive to the whole hdd. gah! that's 8 gigs of space that I am never going to use because I am way too lazy to copy over files to another partition. Now if only I can recreate that partition. :T

The search continues for something that will allow me to take advantage of the full capacity of this old piece of junk. :T

 

sosaiso,

Here are some other free partition managers you can try:

Partition Logic here:

http://partitionlogic.org.uk/about.html

"Partition logic does not currently support the following:
Partitioning of SCSI hard disks, and some SATA hard disks
Non MS-DOS/MBR-style partition tables (i.e. Sun, BSD, EFI/GPT)
Formatting filesystems other than FAT and EXT2
Resizing filesystems other than NTFS (Windows XP filesystems)
Serial mice
USB keyboards and mice
Keyboard layouts other than UK English, US English, Italian, or German

Ranish Partition Manager here:

http://www.ranish.com/part/

Partition Manager is a boot manager and hard disk partitioning tool. It gives users high level of control for running multiple operating systems, such as Linux, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, and Windows 98/2k/XP on a single disk. It could create, format, copy, move, and resize up to 32 primary and extended partitions. It has command line interface similar to gdisk and a simulation mode that works with the large files instead of messing with the real disks.

If these fail, you can download a 30-day trial of BootIt NG from Terabyte Unlimited (see link in my prior post) and try it.

Or you could create a FAT32 (or recreate the NTFS) partition with the [presumably] empty space, format it and assign it a drive letter and use for file storage. The MS Disk Management utility should be able to do this. Right-click an unallocated region of a basic disk, and then click New Partition, and then click New Logical Drive. In the New Partition Wizard, click Next, click Primary partition, and then follow the instructions on your screen. This, at least, should be able to take you back to where you started.

bktII

 

Partition magic can merge the partitions with out data loss in just a couple of clicks. I have done it quite a few times.

bigc

 

bigc73542,

Interesting approach. I use BootIt NG to manage my partitions and did a quick search on the web and in their user manual. No word on merging partitions (although there may be a way to do it that the BootIT experts are aware of).

Score one point for Partition Magic!

However, it sounds like she deleted her blank 2nd NTFS partition.

bktII

 

sosaiso,

I was poking around a bit after your last post and found this bug report for gparted, "Partition table destroyed when resizing NTFS":

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/ source/gparted/ bug/48229

"Upstream bug report was closed saying that quite some NTFS resize bugs were fixed in gparted-0.2

Also:

"Same sorts of things frequently happen with NTFS when resizing with DOS/Windows tools.

Neither are something I am aware of as I am a Terabyte user and have never had problems resizing NTFS partitions.

What version of gparted are you using? If not 0.2, you should upgrade for safety.

bktII

 

hello btkII,

I used the most recent version of the GParted LiveCD. Dont' really understand what the problem was, unless GParted cannot resize my boot partition. Which, after a little reading I'm pretty sure it cannot. Unless I am wrong. I do hope I am wrong.

Oh wells, time to utilize that space by getting some sort of Linux installation up and running there. Thanks for the help though.