Hi All,
My wife's laptop has a partitioned hard drive, it came from the manufacturer like this.
The C: Drive has Windows prog's in it and the data gets put into the D: Drive.
During the week, she tried to download a Vista Service pack onto the C: Drive but was told it hadn't enough space. The next day I contacted the laptop support and was basically told to 'manage the C: drive' and move/clear out unwanted data onto the D: Drive. I did this and have now managed to download the service pack and all's well.

By really going through all the files I've now cleared out about 3Gb of space on the C: Drive, but it's left us wondering……. with large service pack downloads, won't we again have a too small space in the future? What happens then?
With a largely unused D: Drive, is it possible to move the partition to give a little more space?
Can it happen simply or do we have to go through the mess of a wipe and re-install?

Any Guru's out there have any thoughts?
thanks
Q

If you have an Ubuntu live CD. It has a program called GParted which can resize partitions etc. You can also use this Gparted Live CD

But, I've never used it on Vista. It works fine with XP and so long the NTFS file system is the same for XP and Vista you should be okay. You can also delete the D partition and resize the C partition to use the space made available

I use Acronis Disk Director, there's a free trial available which will do the work you need. Rather astonishingly for me, I've forked out the money for this and it's sister backup product… 😕

Easeus partition manager (free) did the job for me…but best advice would be do backup any valuable files 1st – just in case (and to make this simple I bought a £60 external Western Digital passport xternal hard drive (tiny and usb powered) .

p.s. I found 'Spacemonger' to be a great way of identifying where all the space was going 'missing'

Vista has a built in partition resizer

Start > right click Computer > Manage

the vista one is poor…(something like it allows you to shrink a volume but not expand…?)

It works well IMO

It has 2 options – Extend Volume or Shrink Volume

Vista one worked well for me too, had a mate who used gparted then found about the vista one…he reckons the vista one is ALOT faster

wow – thanks people, lots of stuff here!
I've been directed to 'windirstat' which is a nice little programme that allows you to see what is actually taking up your hdd space. That has been a help to show me exactly what on the C: drive is taking up space, and so what I needed to transfer onto the D:

Before asking I did quickly search Windows Suppoort and i too found stuff about shrinking a partitioned drive but it didn't seem like it allowed me to expand. Obviously it does! I will go back and check my Vista. If I've got one built in then it might save a lot of messing.

thanks for the tips people.
Have a good weekend
Q

Update:
Just so's you know…..I've successfully moved the partition on my wife's hard drive!
I also asked my Bro'-in-law the same question, as he's computer trained and happened to be going out with a mate who runs an IT buisiness. Bro' then used the recommended programme to move his partition and therefore give me a blow by blow intruction over the phone.
We used ( cos it was recommended by IT friend and Fubar ^^ ) Easeus Partition Manager, downloaded the free version and tweaked the partition. We reduced the D: by ~ 10Gb and then increased the C; by about the same.
So….it all went well and even *I* could manage it!
thanks again for all the tips
cheers
Q