Help! Partition issue in Vista

quad_red

Hi folks,

Hopefully someone can help me here. My folks have a desktop with Vista on it. For some reason the main hard drive was partitioned in a weird way when it was bought. Basically, there are two partitions.

An almost empty 240gb partition.
And an almost full 20gb partition containing the OS, office, all my folks photos, docs etc.

Wtf?

I tried following the instructions on this link to shrink the 240gb partition. But now I've ended up with a 138gb unallocated space.

When I right click the 20gb partition the 'extend volume' option is grayed out.

Any suggestions here? A reinstall isn't an option - my parents have lost all the installation disks ( keep calm, keep calm, breathe deeply :mad: ).

Thanks,
Insanely frustratedly yours,
Quad



http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/06-073717L/9370/jpg/11/2010/img5/glowfoto

Snowbat

See http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/83ada32f-1065-4f97-89bb-a318d080867f/

Unfortunately the 20 GB NTFS partition you want to expand is at the end of the drive (in HDDs it's also the area with the worst I/O performance - not a good location for a boot/OS partition).

softdancomputer

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-express/

quad_red

Thanks guys.

As you said, the 20gb partition with the OS cannot be extended. So i've freed just over a gig and have all my folks docs, etc on the other big partition.

That should suffice til I get down at christmas. I'll have a vista disc at that point and will do a reinstall.

One question - why the **** was it ever set up like that in the first place?

ED E

Just moved my desktop from Vista to 7. Its worth it.

Buy yourself an upgrade disk and reinstall it all. It'll be worth it. Traditionally the OS would be on the first partition.

I'd opt for 40GB and ~260GB.