unallocated partition problem

stulaunch

I have an Elements external harddrive that has an unallocated partition on it of 100 GB.

Now i want to extend the primary partion to include this unallocated one but i cant find a way to do it.
I'm running XP and I believe you cant do it in windows own disk management system.
I have Norton Partition Magic but i cant see a way to do it with that either.

I did think about re-formatting said Harddrive but i've nearly 200GB of stuff on Primary partition and i've nowhere to put it.
Any ideas?

fwor

Provided it's formatted with a common filesystem such as NTFS, GPARTED, can "grow" a partition to fill any unallocated space, provided the resulting partition is contiguous disk space. Even if there is another partition in the way, it may still be possible to move that and then expand.

Easiest way is to download the small bootable LiveCD version here:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

WARNING!!! Backup any data on the drive, because if anything unexpected happens (e.g. a power cut while a move is in progress) you may lose some or all of the disk's contents.

spud17

Just to echo fwor, I've successfully used that disk he links to, but, double check everything, including your backups.

Make sure you know exactly what you're trying to do and how you are going to achieve it.

Then allow plenty of time, it can be a relatively slow process.

John_Gray

I've had good success recently in creating two partitions from one on several PCs with the (free) Easeus Partition Manager software. See the webpage for all the other things it does! As always, the advice is to back everything up first, but extending a partition into unallocated space should be very straightforward and quite rapid.

(BTW Norton Partition Magic should do the same thing...)

TwistedPsycho

I thought you could do this in Disk Management on XP?

John_Gray

TwistedPsycho wrote: »

I thought you could do this in Disk Management on XP?

Well you can, after a fashion, using the Command Line utility DISKPART with the extend parameter. But since DISKPART is so limited I've never bothered with it (for example, you can't split one large partition into two).

And note at the bottom of the writeup about extend:
"Diskpart blocks the extension of only the current system or boot partition." which is a bit cryptic, but I'm guessing it means that you can't extend the C: drive into unallocated space on the disk...

TwistedPsycho

I was thinking more along the lines of making the unpartioned space into a seperate partition.

Not the actual question being asked, but an alternative.

I am trying to think of the route to it via the Control Panel; I will look when i get home from work!

closed

If the data is important you may want to keep 2 copies of it, buy another drive, internal maybe, and copy it onto that, and reformat the usb drive, much safer than repartitioning over usb.

Or find someone with a big drive to copy the data off temporarily.

stulaunch

Thanks everyone for your imput.

Didn't feel confident about using Gparted, so what i did was create a partition of the unallocated space using Noton Partion Magic,
so now i can use it for my photos.

Every program i tried could not extent the unallocated in to the primary one for some reason, always gave an error and wouldn't let me apply changes.

I just thought there would be easy way to allocate the space into main partition but maybe there isn't.