Partition Splitting

I just received a Dell Inspiron 1721 laptop with a 160 GB hard drive (I know, I should have bought a larger hard drive). The OS is Windows Vista Premium.

I want to reconfigure the hard drive so the OS is in its own partition, and the applications and data files are in their own partition.

The hard drive is designated as “Disk 0”, and is currently partitioned as indicated below. I have no idea what the first segment is, what the Recovery (D) partition is for, or what the last segment is for. I assume it is the OS (C partition that I need to split.

• First segment – 63 MB Healthy (EISA Configuration)
• Second segment – RECOVERY (D 10 GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
• Third segment – OS (C 136.49 GB NTFS Healthy (System, Boot, etc. Primary Partition)
• Fourth segment – 2.50 GB Healthy (Primary Partition)

The C partition currently contains about 25 GB of OS, application, data and other files.

If I am muddling through the help files correctly, I can accomplish what I want to do as follows.

• “Shrink” the C partition to 30 GB
• Create a new partition in the vacated space (about 106 GB)
• Uninstall the application programs from the C partition
• Install the application programs in the new partition
• Move the data files (there aren’t many yet) to the new partition

The Windows Vista files take up about 9 GB of space, so there will be a very inefficient 21 GB of unused space in the C partition. Pictures and videos are located on an external USB hard drive. Therefore, the 106 GB of space in the new partition is expected to be adequate for the rest of what I do.

Will this work? Is there an easier way?

I have the current version of TI10, which I am using for another computer (which I am going to retire when I get this new one set up) At this point, I would rather not buy DD or some other disk manager.

Someone on another forum advised me that Dell has already allocated a limit of four entries in the primary partition , so splitting “C” and adding a partition is not an option without deleting something else.

 

I'm trying to do simething similar, but doesn't seem to be a lot of feedback on moving vista parttions.
my goal with yours would be to delete the first two partitions, move c: to beginning of drive,delete last partition, then adjust c:, and make a d: partition.
BUT, I resized MY c: partition, and shrunk an initial partition, and vista gave me an error on reboot.
there should be a way with disk director to do this, but can't seem to find the direction on the forum, as to how do t this withoug some other suggested steps of altering the boot files, etc.
nick

 

Nick,

The more I dug into the issues, the more I realized that I was way out of my comfort zone. I have decided to leave things the way they were set up.

My backup system of a monthly disk image supplemented by differential backups when appropriate seems reasonable to me. Since all pictures/videos/music are managed on external USB drives, the time required to process the disk images/differentials will probably not test my patience.

Frank