partition software

[paydaymom]

ok, my mom in law has an emachine with windows xp on it. It is 150 or more gb and I was hoping to figure out how to partition the drives for her without much expense. In some posts on here I read that you can do this with windows xp but I don't believe she has a disk that came with it, just some recovery disks she made when she first got it. Also I read something about a partition logic or something that was free software. Could any of you advise how to do this?

Thanks

[ITlover]

Well you can use WinXP CD or Win98 CD for making partitions . If you have WinXP CD and if you just want to partition the drive where your winxp is already installed then you simply have to insert it into CD-ROM drive and you will get the messege " press any key to boot with/from CD" ,just press any key or space bar to boot from CD and your computer will boot from CD.

If you donot get this messege,then you have to go into the BIOS setting immediately after turning your Computer on, by pressing F2 button, a BIOS screen will appear and in that just go to Boot Sequence and change the 1st Boot sequence from HDD to CD-ROM and then save these changes you made and exit.

Then you will get the messege " press any key to boot from/with cd", just press space bar
or any button to boot from CD. You will see names of many files appearing at the bottom of the setup screen and just relax donot do anything .

When the next screen appears it will ask you what you want to do with the setup, exist it , repair the current winxp or start a new setup. Just click enter to start the new setup and it will show you the partitions on your HDD and ask you where you want to install winxp and it will also inform you that you already have winxp installed. At the bottom of the screen you will see an option or unpartitioning a drive, you can unpartition the drive where winxp is installed and then remake the partition and format it with FAT32 and then continue with installation setup of winxp.

If you want to make new partitions in your entire HDD, then simply insert win98 cd in cd-rom drive and you get 2 messeges :

1)boot from CD.

2)boot from Hard Disk.

highlight "boot from CD" and press enter, you will then get 4 messeges:

1) Start Win98 from CD.
2) Start Computer without CD-ROM Support
3) Start Computer with CD-ROM Support.

Chose the 3rd one and you will enter the Dos-Prompt which might look like this :

A:/>fdisk

type fdisk as I have written after A:/>, and you will enter the fdisk environment and you will get a messege of using large drive support, chose yes.

and then you will be able to make partitions in your HDD.

I hope this is clear to you ,if it is not, then please donot hesitate to ask and if you want to know how to make partitions in HDD after entering fdisk environment, everybody is here to help you.

Please note that fdisk command is used to make partitions in HDD.

Their are other utilities/softwares as well which you can use to make partitions and if you want to keep your current winxp and want to make new partitions in your other drives, then you can use disk managment which can be accessed by rightclicking "My computer" , click "manage" and then click "disk management".

Regards,

[ITlover]

Their is a question above all this, why do you want to make partitions in your drive?

[alfie2]

Originally Posted by paydaymom ok, my mom in law has an emachine with windows xp on it. It is 150 or more gb and I was hoping to figure out how to partition the drives for her without much expense. In some posts on here I read that you can do this with windows xp but I don't believe she has a disk that came with it, just some recovery disks she made when she first got it. Also I read something about a partition logic or something that was free software. Could any of you advise how to do this? Thanks

you can get various kinds of FREE partitioning softwares from here:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit...neditors.shtml

"partition logic" is also listed there!

[paydaymom]

Originally Posted by ITlover Their is a question above all this, why do you want to make partitions in your drive?

One for the OS and another for all the data she has. Isn't this what you do for that?

[pam123]

Check out this thread : http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...t=partitioning

If you use software downloaded from alfie's link make sure, as a precaution, that you scan the file with your anti-virus before you install and use it.

[alfie2]

the links on that page are linked creators of the said/listed softwares; I dont think the creators will release virii, but never hurts to scan them anyway.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by paydaymom One for the OS and another for all the data she has. Isn't this what you do for that?

If you want your mom-in-law to call you repeatedly because she has run out of space on her OS partition go ahead and do it. Otherwise, leave it alone.

[XenaWP]

Originally Posted by mairving If you want your mom-in-law to call you repeatedly because she has run out of space on her OS partition go ahead and do it. Otherwise, leave it alone.

Yeah, welcome to my world. 4 1/2 years ago I guess 20 gb for an OS partition seemed huge. Now, I'm constantly butting up against it.

If you do partition, make it 2x as large as you imagine you'll ever need for the OS/program files partition.

[paydaymom]

Originally Posted by XenaWP Yeah, welcome to my world. 4 1/2 years ago I guess 20 gb for an OS partition seemed huge. Now, I'm constantly butting up against it. If you do partition, make it 2x as large as you imagine you'll ever need for the OS/program files partition.

I was just going to divide, each would 75gb.

[glc]

Unless your MIL is computer savvy, leave it alone. There is really no functional advantage to multiple partitions other than faster defrags. Just show her how to back up her files if that's what you are concerned about.

[ITlover]

Originally Posted by paydaymom One for the OS and another for all the data she has. Isn't this what you do for that?

Yes you are right, but I didnot know how many partitions you want to have in your HDD and whether you want to keep your existing winxp in it or not. I didnot knew that you were an advance user or a new user.
If you want to just have 2 partitions ,1 for OS and another 1 for data then its ok but I donot think that 150 GB of HDD should be used for just a single OS and for data storage. Even 40 or 80GB HDD is more than enough for your mother in law if she is concerned about cost. In 150 GB of HDD which is obviously more expensive then 40 or 80 GB HDD, just imagine how many partitions you can have in 150 GB of HDD , you can even have 7 extended partitions eg. D:, E:, F: and etc. just for data storage and can even apply security on those partitions that have sensitive or important data.


It also depends how much data your mother in law has and how much data she wants to protect which is pretty important if any other person tries to use that computer either locally or over the network if your computer is connected to a network.

As I mentioned that if you want to keep your existing WinXP and want to make partitions in other spaces of HDD, then the disk managment option in WinXP is pretty cool and you can use that to make partitions.

I hope this helps,

Regards,

[ITlover]

Originally Posted by alfie2 you can get various kinds of FREE partitioning softwares from here: http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit...neditors.shtml "partition logic" is also listed there!

Hi, Alfie,

Thanks for giving this link, I just checked this link out but their were certain things I wanted to clarify. In the introduction of this link, it said that we can even move the partition on a HDD from 1 location to another, is it talking about moving the partition from 1 location to another in same HDD or another HDD?

[alfie2]

Resize partition / move partition
Situations when you have to move some free space to another partition or to merge partitions occur quite often.
Standard partitioning software generally provides such functions as resize partition and rarely move partition. Actually, "moving partition" wipes and re creates partitions on the specified spot. IT's more or less related to "resizing". Data loss is a general problem of such software. However professional partitioning software can guarantee your data safety.
Moving, means from one partition to another in the same HDD.