14 replies to this topic

[iGuest]

Excess Primary Partitions on one DiskHow To Convert Primary Partition Into Logical Partition In Win Xp

Rather unfortunately the formatting tool that comes with the installation of windows XP and Vista can create extra partitions on your HDD - I myself had (on a fool's whim) decided to use Vista's install to create 2 partitions on my primary HDD.  - It made both partitions primary without a choice for a logical partition.

-reply by James Bone

 

[iGuest]

How to use PartionsHow To Convert Primary Partition Into Logical Partition In Win Xp

I have just installed a second OS on the 2nd Partition (the1st Partition is the operating system I was using before I partition. Both OS's are XP Pro. I restored an image of the 1st Partition -- it was created right after I'd finished installing XP and the programs I wanted in that partition. I was succesful and the new, dual-boot system is working great.

I am not PC Wizard and I do not understand very much about PCs. Now that it's finally ready to use, I 'm not ready to use it. I've looked all over the Net for info about using partitions, but all I can find are mostly about installing, creating partitions and so on. I didn't spot anything here that might help me learn how to copy files and move them, or answers to questions like can you copy a section of an image that has a different OS, and is stored on a partition of my external drive -- can I install these files in either of the Primary partitions on my internal drive?

Any help appreciated. I'm not  necessarily looking for someone to teach me these things, but I do need to find a guide or something like that to help me. HELP!.

utripp

[k_nitin_r]

@delivi

In Windows XP, go to the Control Panel. Open the Computer Management console and go to the Disk Management section. You should see your drives listed here.

Now, using Windows Explorer, copy all your files across to another disk drive or partition. Then, using disk management, delete the two primary partitions that you want to combine and create a new extended partition in its place. Then, within the extended partition, create a logical partition. Then, copy your files back from the other disk or partition that you copied them to and you have the end result.

The scandisk error typically occurs when you do not shut down your PC correctly thus leading to a scandisk check on starting up your computer. You can skip the disk check by pressing any key (usually, they do not mean just about "any" key *giggle*) but then you may have the same prompt upon your next reboot for scanning the hard disk partition. I would suggest you run a complete scandisk so that the utility can search for bad sectors, errors, or inconsistencies in the file system and drive and then reboot to check if the scandisk message still appears.

@Galahad

It is possible to have multiple primary partitions - hence the three primary partitions on the same drive. The OP mentioned that he/she has a single hard disk drive, which is the 160GB hard disk drive that he/she referred to. If you do want to combine multiple disk drives to appear as a single partition, Microsoft Windows versions from Windows 2000 onward have this capability although this is limited to only the server and workstation versions of the software. Windows XP Professional may have the capability to create a partition that spans across multiple hard disk drives but Windows XP Home Edition would not.

I do concur on your choice of Partition Magic. It helps avoid the need to copy the data, delete the partitions, and re-create the partitions, because it attempts to preserve the data as it converts the filesystems and partitions. You may not, however, be able to get a single partition across multiple hard disk drives using Partition Magic (though they may have added in the capability in later versions of the software, which I am unaware of). Partition Magic is commercial software and requires the purchase of a license. You should backup your data before you use Partition Magic because errors are bound to occur at any time, from a hanged operation due to the inability of the hard disk drive to read a sector to problems originating from the hardware or even power cuts. Having a backup is rather cheap because of the availability of DVD-Rs and cheap external hard disk drives. A free alternative to Partition Magic is the Linux-based gParted.

BTW, I would like to add that the conversion to the NTFS file system that you have suggested can be performed using Disk Management in the Computer Management console without having any data loss (or so they claim; I haven't had any data loss using their file system conversion utility so far and if I do, may my backups save me). I cannot attest to the increased reliability of NTFS over the FAT32 file system but Microsoft does claim that the NTFS file system supports journaling which means a greater reliability when writing to the disk drive.

@uiop

gParted is free and Linux based so I would believe that it supports more file systems than Disk Management in the Computer Management console but Partition Magic supports a lot of partition types. I wouldn't really know if Partition Magic is based on entirely proprietary code or if they used an open-source BSD project to build it, but in either case they have lots of source code to build upon that has been extensively tried and tested so it is unlikely that you will have a problem with Partition Magic.

@Robert Elier

The Fedora Linux installer does have a partition manager for you to be able to remove primary partitions and create extended and logical partitions on your hard disk drive. When you are running the Fedora installer, look for the prompt that asks you if you want to erase the entire disk and use the whole disk for Linux, create custom partitions, or use existing partitions. I have used the Fedora and the old Red Hat Linux distribution installers and that haven't failed me yet when used as intended.

[Quatrux]

To add my two cents I can add an alternative to Partition Magic

I've found and started using a really good tool for playing with partitions, it's called EASEUS Partition Master.

It can almost do anything you want and it their page they have quite good tutorials how to achieve a desired result. I've done some things and didn't need to do any recovery and didn't have any problems. For example, I had on one computer C and D disks, C was 10 GB and D was ~250 GB, due to I was out of space on C disk, and because it was a C partition on which windows is installed, I couldn't do a lot with windows disk management and etc. but with EASEUS Partition Master for free I could extend my C drive without moving the files and I only needed to reboot once as I remember or maybe I rebooted because I wanted to. To do that, I needed to defragment both C and D drivers, scan them for bad blocks and whole, the program later did everything itself, I've made my C disk 60 GB by taking that space from D disk and no files were lost

It has moved D drive files to the end of the D disk and took the space from the D disk from the start and added it to the disk C, what I later have one is I defragmented both drives again. So it's really a powerful tool for FREE!

If doing it the old way, I guess I would need to delete D disk and if possible extend C disk, I didn't find any program for free I could trust though, but EASUS worked and I am really happy about it, due to I was thinking of doing a complete format of that system to rearrange the partitions.

You can download it from file hippo: http://www.filehippo...on_master_home/

Here is a quote about it:

Quote

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk.

Resize/Move partition
Extend system drive
Copy disk & partition
Merge partition
Split partition
Redistribute free space
Convert dynamic disk
Recover partition

I thought it would be good to add a list of partitioning software to this topic: http://en.wikipedia....ioning_software