Extending A Partition

[Drazick]

Hello.

I have a laptop made by ACER.

It has one HD which is didvided into 3 partitions:

1. The Backup OEM.

2. The OS (Vista Home Basic).

3. Regular NTFS partition.

Using Diskpart I managed to delete the OEM partition.

Now my Partitions are as described here:

What I wanna do is extend C with the unallocated space.

I tried using Diskpart as the following:

As you can see from some reason I just can't extend it.

Any idea?

Thanks.

[McTavish]

The Vista tools can only extend partitions the other way on a drive. To move the starting sector of a partition you will need third-party software, but be aware that this type of operation is risky and not something I would recommend. You would be better making an image or a clone of the Windows partition, then delete the original and restore to the new location. Safer and probably much quicker.

Of course Vista’s starting sector on a hard drive (its offset) is used in the boot process so if you move the beginning of the partition it will render Vista unbootable. You would either have to know how to repair Vista after the move, or be sure any third-party software you use is fully Vista compatible and capable of making the necessary adjustments for you. The only third-party tools I can vouch for at the moment are those from Paragon.

[DonDamm]

To add - I've had some limited success using the Startup Repair in Vista. Making an image and then recreating C: and placing the image there is a good idea. If it doesn't boot, using the installation disk and choosing the first repair option should reset the boot files. Now since Vista Home Basic does not give you access to ImageX as far as I know, and that is MS new imaging utility available in other versions. If you upgrade to Ultimate, for example you would have access to it. It is an interesting approach since the images are made slightly differently than most other imaging solutions (like Ghost, BootIt NG, True Image, etc).

Also, I notice that the C: and D: partitions are roughly equal in size. Rather than increase the size of C:, I'd be inclined to reduce it to a more functional say 25-30GB, move the pagefile, User files, and other data I want to keep intact to D:, and then increase the size of D: to use all the unallocated space.

One of the best ways to do this is to make an image and backup any data to a CD/DVD disk or USB stick, then use diskpart to reset all the partitions the way you want using the installation disk as if you were doing a new install, and then restore the image and data.

Let us know how it turns out! :^)

[FAT64]

Use Acronis Disk Director?

[Drazick]

The Vista tools can only extend partitions the other way on a drive. To move the starting sector of a partition you will need third-party software, but be aware that this type of operation is risky and not something I would recommend. You would be better making an image or a clone of the Windows partition, then delete the original and restore to the new location. Safer and probably much quicker.

Of course Vista’s starting sector on a hard drive (its offset) is used in the boot process so if you move the beginning of the partition it will render Vista unbootable. You would either have to know how to repair Vista after the move, or be sure any third-party software you use is fully Vista compatible and capable of making the necessary adjustments for you. The only third-party tools I can vouch for at the moment are those from Paragon.

Didn't get you all the way.

Under what conditions will I be able to extend the partition using Vista tools?

Will I be able to extend D?

Thanks.

[Louie]

You can try PartedMagic LiveCD to accomplish this. It is free and contains a lot of useful programs included gparted.

Just remember to backup your data before you do this, just to be sure you don't lose anything.

atlef.

[McTavish]

You can only extend a partition from its ending point on a disk and only if there is free space that you can extend into. In your case you cannot extend D: because it is already at the end of the drive. If you deleted D: then you could extend C: into the new free space. The Vista tools can also shrink partitions, but again only from the same side. You cannot move the starting point of an existing partition.

Many third-party tools can move partitions the other way on a drive, but I am not an advocate of such things because it is a complex operation that can be prone to errors. If you need to move partitions in that direction it is safer and quicker to delete the partition and create a new one at the desired position.