Partitions

[Huey]

Hi all,

I would love some help please. I just brought a new system and wanted to partition my HDD however when I tied as I was loading xp, it wouldn't allow it. So I tried to do it with the c: prompt by following the instructions but (maybe I'm just dumb) I couldn't for the life of me figure it out, any hints or do I need to buy partitioning software?

Any help will be appreciated

Cheers

Huey

[Arie]

I would love some help please. I just brought a new system and wanted to partition my HDD however when I tied as I was loading xp, it wouldn't allow it. So I tried to do it with the c: prompt by following the instructions but (maybe I'm just dumb) I couldn't for the life of me figure it out, any hints or do I need to buy partitioning software?

First of all, where did you bring it?

Your question is somewhat unclear. No, you don't need to purchase any additional software for partitioning your hard disk. When you boot from your Windows XP installation disc, at one point you can choose where to install to. Here you can delete all existing partitions if there are any and then create new partitions. Please be aware that if you delete a partition, all data on it will be lost. Say your hard disk is 100GB big and you only have one partition, then you can't create any other partitions as you have no more hard disk space available. Delete this 100GB partition so that you have zero partitions and create for example two new partitions; 30GB and 70GB. If this does not work for you, please describe what error message you get while installing as currently your question is too unclear to come up with a better answer than this.

[Ponch]

If you are still in the installation fase (as I understand), you will be prompted to install XP in a new partition created in the "unused space" or something like that. At that point, you can choose to have that partition take all the space or part of it (in % or in MegaBytes). That is the part I think you missed. Create the partition the size you want, the easiest is then to install XP, and create a 2nd partition in the remaining space from within "Disk Management" after XP is totally installed. If you missed, there is always "GParted", a live (boot) cd that can resize your partition very easily afterwards. Gparted is downloadable as such (iso) and also included in Ubuntu CDs.

[gosh]

if this is a new computer you need to be careful because your OEM might have installed a drive overlay. I would recommend contacting the OEM first to make sure blowing away the partitions won't hurt anything.

In recovery console you would type

mkdiskraw 0

assuming 0 is your hard drive. Type mkdiskraw /? to see the syntax. This will blow out all your partitions.

Then you want to use diskpart to create the partitions, then format them using format /FS:NTFS, all within recovery console. Then reboot and run setup

-gosh

[Huey]

Thanks heaps guys but I have already loaded xp and a lot of other software, I don't really want to format and start again, is there any way around this?

[Ponch]

Gparted.

[Huey]

Sorry Ponch, I didn't read your first response right through, derrrrr