"Free" Partition resizing tools?

DiscoStu

Google has been no help with this at all due to crappy software companies trying to sell me stuff. im looking for a free partition resizing tool that wont kindly kill the contents of the hard disk upon completing it job. any ideas?

Boberto

Ahem... FDISK...

only messin... I don't know of any free tools. Beware though they can screw with your system. I used Partition Magic to resize a partition and it crashed halfway causing the disk to fail. Had to reformat

Capt'n Midnight

Instead of using the word "FREE" or ever "FREEWARE" try GNU or "public domain"
also use -shareware -30 - demo -trial

Most versions of Linux have HDD partitioning and re-sizing utils built in (and since they are designed to be used before the install you usually don't need to install linux first) Also from time to time you get a util like that on a cover disk (not free but close)

On the www.knoppix.net CD (700MB download) you get partition backup sw as well ..

Tip: do a search on the Unix forums in case asked before...
Also FAT32 is less risky to resize than NTFS

DiscoStu

i've all bar given up.

partition magic crashes during the operation as does paragon partition manager(plus some really nasty bsods on boot eeven in safe mode). i have mandrake 9.1 but its partition tools will kindly make mince meat of my windows instalation as do all the older linux versions in my possesion.

Capt'n Midnight

beg/borrow/steal a second HDD
Uninstall all unneed crap - clean out all tempfiles
treesize is a great util - if you are in culling mode
Defrag and scandisk the first HDD
(if you have 2k/xp/9x you can backup the HDD to a file on the second HDD)

or use GHOST to copy partition image to the second (it can resize and write a compressed file onto a FAT32 partition. )

The nuke the first drive and and then GHOST or use backup to restore back to the first.

Dalamar

You could use a (free) program called fips to re-size your partition, but i don't know how good it is.

quaalude

I use Boot It NG all the time in work. Free fully-functional 30 day trial here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

GRAHAM2002

pm me

aclane

I've used Partition Manager 5.5 Demo before and found it quite good.

You can download a demo here: http://www.partition-manager.com/home/personal/demo.htm

vibe666

I'm pretty sure one of the HD makers has agood little bit of s/w that does the job fairly quickly, but I don't remember exactly which one.

think it was sdeagate: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

or possibly Maxtor: http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm

or maybe one of the other HD guys.

whichever one it was (think it was the MaxBlast one) it's kinda like fdisk on steroids. v.quick, v.good.

but i think the newer version might only work with maxtor HD's, although I used to have an older version which worked with all HD's.

and you'd have to use it on a fresh HD (or one you wanted wiped), or it will kill all your data (probably).

sorry for being so vague.

pdogs

Hi everyone - Nice looking boards.

IMHO its hard to beat PM (at least v7.0). As with any partitioning utility being used on HDDs containing data - back it up first.

Freebies
Ranish
Free FDISK from Free DOS
Win2K and WinXP's Disk Management tools can setup a whole variety of partitions after installation or from the bootable installation CDs, (especially if you are starting from scratch), but they can't resize, merge, etc other than by deleting and then recreating partitions.