Re-partitioning question

[Force Flow]

If I were to delete a partiton with FDISK, would it affect the others? It is the last drive partition.

What I want to do is split it into two partitions by deleting it and creating two new logical drives. Is this feasible without loss of data on the other partitions?

[reboot]

AFAIK, no. If you do any partitioning with fdisk, it will destroy all partitions, but don't quote me on that.
Anyone have a spare HD to test it on?

If you don't get a difinitive answer in the next hour or so, I'll try it and report back.

[Cricket]

I think the safest thing to do is use Partition Magic rather than using fdisk for that.

The hard drive is really broken up into two partition with the secondary partition broken up into logical drives. Are you thinking of playing with the secondary partition or with some logical drives within the partition?

:) Cricket

[HAL9000]

If I understand you correctly, you have a drive with say C, D and E on it, and you would like to delete E, and split it into E and F. You can do this with FDISK and it will destroy the info on E, but leave C and D untouched.

[Force Flow]

That's the idea, Hal.

I have C, D, E, F and G presently and would like to delete G and split it.

Now, it gets slightly complicated:
C, D & E are on HDD0
F & G are on HDD1.
C is the only primary partition. Everything else is in extended partitions as logical drives.
Here's something else I probably should add: C has win98SE installed, D has win2k, and F has win XP.

[reboot]

Fdisking one drive will not affect the other drive in any way.
HAL, are you positive that his F drive won't be affected by removing and splitting G?

[EzyStvy]

I would do inside Disk Administrator in Administrative tools before I tried Fdisk.

[HAL9000]

Originally posted by reboot
Fdisking one drive will not affect the other drive in any way.
HAL, are you positive that his F drive won't be affected by removing and splitting G?

Positive... I've done it many times. He can delete the logical drive and lose only what is on the logical drive. From there, he will have unassigned space that he can break up as he sees fit. FDISK won't allow you to delete the extended partition while logical drives exist, so you can't accidentily do that and lose F.

[reboot]

OK, as you can tell, with the advent of bootable OS CD's, partition magic, and Ghost, I've lost touch with fdisk ;)
How about using XP admin disk management? I would think that's easier than fdisk.

[Force Flow]

Originally posted by reboot
OK, as you can tell, with the advent of bootable OS CD's, partition magic, and Ghost, I've lost touch with fdisk ;)
How about using XP admin disk management? I would think that's easier than fdisk.

Lol, Reboot :D

I always try to do things as cheap as possible, and I don't have partition magic. :p

My main O/S is 98SE, hence the reason for using FDISK. ;)

Btw, I wasn't aware you could access disk management tools after XP was installed. Where's it located?

[HAL9000]

Disk management would work quite well as suggested. Right click on My computer in XP and select manage.

[Force Flow]

So that would be better than FDISK? Would that be the way you would approach this problem, Hal?

[HAL9000]

I would probably use the Disk Management tool in XP because you can delete the partiton, recreate them, and format all without a reboot.

[Force Flow]

Okay. I'll do it through XP, then. Thanks Hal, Cricket and Reboot! ;)

[punkinjean]

I have just done this very thing in the past three days. You will not lose anything on the drives your are not splitting and/or formatting but if you delete the extended drive and then split, you will lose that drive letter and that will change the drive letters of the next drives in the hieriarchy (think I misspelled that). That did not make any difference to me but I have heard that it can affect usage of CD-ROMs, CD Writers, etc. I used command prompt fdisk and I also used Disk Management in Administrative Tools in Control Panel on WIN XP. I think Administrative Tools is easier.

[Force Flow]

Welcome to PCMech, punkinjean! :)

Just so you know, it's spelled "Hierarchy " (no "i" after the "r") :p

Thanks for the confirmation on logical drive repartitioning question ;)

[reboot]

Cool stuff (digs in to Disk management to mess with partitions)...

[Force Flow]

Well, I just repartitioned with XP's disk management tools. It went smoothly. Thanks guys! ;)