Partitioning a Hard Drive

[jannybean2002]

How do I partition the hard drive? I have 80 gigs all on c drive.

My O/S is windows xp home.

I tried to use the disk management but I think I'm missing something....

[teengeek88]

Youll need partition magic for that i believe if that works with NTFS.... it does right? cane sumone back me up on that

[John Prophet]

Hmmm, c drive? Are you doing a fresh install?? If so you just let the xp disk do the partition and format.

If you are adding this as a second drive..then I suppose you would just run fdisk from the command prompt and partition it from there.

If there are 2 drives there should be 5 options on fdisk..the 5th one is "change drives" or whatevr..allowing you to switch between the two drives...so you switch to the 80g drive then you partition it.


But I would think you could do that from disk management but I havent used disk management before so Im not sure, lol. (yes, Im a paper mcp)

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---> Youll need partition magic for that i believe if that works with NTFS.... it does right? cane sumone back me up on that

Well, I COULD back you up..but then we'd BOTH be wrong! lol....you shouldnt need partition magic just to put a partition on a drive.....now to resize one without losing info...maybe you'd need PM

[teengeek88]

i took it as she meant that she had an 80 gig hdd all on 1 partition (c:/) and she has her XP running on that right now

[jannybean2002]

it didn't give me the option to do the partitions when I did the install. Is that because I went for the upgrade option?

[John Prophet]

hmmm..youve lost me, lol

start from scratch.

You have a new hard drive and you want to install windows XP on it??

If thats it then it should partition it for you....

what do you mean by "upgrade"? You are upgrading from another OS?

IS this 80g the ONLY drive or is it a second drive?

[John Prophet]

OK wait.....are you saying that right now you just have 1 big partition and you want to split it up to some smaller partitions???

If so then ignore my last post,lol.


In THAT case my apologies to teengeek88 because he was exactly right!! He understood and I didnt catch it correctly....I think you need partition magic for that.

UNLESS you can "resize" a partition with disk manager but I sort of doubt you can. You can make a partition a "dynamic" partition so that it can be resized etc...but I am not sure if you can make a bootable partiton a dynamic partition so that it can be resized.

I think partition magic is needed.



Sorry teengeek...I was drinking a chocolate milkshake and it clouded my judgement...a massive blood sugar spike followed by insulin release....it'll get ya everytime! lol

JP

[jannybean2002]

ok, here goes....
I have just the 1 80 gig hard drive, I've just installed windows xp home. It didn't give me the option to partition as I was installing.
I've since checked (with the help an support pages) to see if I could use disk management but I can't.

I am not upgrading from another OS, windows xp was already installed by the manufacturer, I was running xp again to see if it gave me the optioon to partition.

[jannybean2002]

whooops!!! hehe, so I need to buy partition magic now yes?

[John Prophet]

Yeah..I am thinking that there possibly IS some way to partition it during install....but I am not sure....maybe it asks if you want to use ALL the space on the partition.....so if you leave half of it or whatever then you can partition it later in disk manager perhaps.

Either way, you can do it now with partition manager.

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Maybe someone can confirm whether there is any option to use different partition sizes....or if no one confirms it..maybe I will later tnite..I have a loose 80g drive sitting around..I could go see if it gives a choice of the partition size etc during an xp install.

JP