I am new to windows 7. Recently i bought a laptop with windows pre-installed in it.
I have a HD drive of 500gb. Windows is already preinstalled on it. I Want to partition the drive without affecting any data. I loaded some 30 gb data already on the drive. I want to partition the 450gb drive into 3/4 drives each of 100gb, such that i can allocate the Os with a drive and remaining 2/3 with my personal data songs, movies...etc.
I want to partition the drive and I don't know how??? Can anyone please explain me step by step how to do it. The main point here is do i need to again reformat the whole drive such that before re-installing Windows 7 i can partition it (or) do i have any alternate solution such that while running windows I can partition the current drive without affecting any data other than system files.
I have a 2 partition disk split: C:Windows 7 & E:data . I want to sneak in a partition at the start of E: to hold XP os and thus "F:" becomes my new data partition. Shrink as far as I know will create a space after the currently existing E:. The added problem is I am only playing with a small drive and cannot just copy over the data.
One day I booted up my comp & My HDD was Partitioned into 2 Parts. My C: Drive Also my Boot Drive has Windows 7 on it while The other Half of my HDD My F: Drive has all my files on itI was wondering how I could Merge these to Together without hurting or losing anything on my comp?
I currently have a dual boot system of XP and 7. Xp was the first installed os. After partitioning Windows 7 was added and made the default os.
I now want to get rid of XP and reallocate the space to Win 7. I have assumed that I can do this from within Win 7 using Disk Management. From win 7 the partition for win 7 appears as C: and for Xp its D: And likewise from XP the partition for XP is C: and 7 is D: (if you follow what I mean).
Now when I try to delete the XP partition from Disk Management it does not give me the option to do so (the option is greyed out). Is there a way around this? If not I may as well just wait until I get the retail copy of 7. I am going to presume that the mbr is most likely to be on the XP C: drive? as that was the os installed initially.
After all the trouble that I went to remove the old partitions on the HD in my secondary rig, I forgot to disconnect a second HD installed, and after going through a number of other repairs just before starting the installation, I wasn't thinking clearly and deleted the partitions that I had made with the HD installed on my primary rig.
Attempting to recreat the partitions with the installation procedure got things even more messed up because I didn't find any facility for actuallyt creating a partition of the size that I wanted, only a format function, which I assumed would format the entire drive, or as I did, click Next, hoping to find something more in the next screen, but it then just started the installation itself, and took the entire drive, except a 100MB partition that it also created for the system reserved functions.
Not being in the mood to once again remove the harddrive back to my primary rig for prep, I let it continue the installation, because it would not permit me to delete the partitions that it had made. I'm hoping that I can resize the main partition after the install completes, but if like when I installed the x32 bit version in this manner, it scattered files across the partition in a fashion that would make it difficult to do so.
On my primary rig, I have the entire OS installed on one neat 100GB partition, and that is what I want here also. I'm trying to decide whether to nuke the HD again, or finish the installation and attempt to customize it afterward. Which would be better?
i just got a new 320gb hard drive for my thinkpad and installed it with no problems, and then did a clean install of windows 7. everything is working fine, but i'm wondering about setting up partitions and backups.
i back up my files to an external hard drive every couple weeks or so. i don't have anything set up on my laptop, though.
should i set up a partition on my laptop to create a backup?
how big should the partition be?
can i set it up even though i've already installed and formatted the drive?
My disk crashed and had to reload everything, I took it to Toshiba service center. Before the crush my hard disk was just one big physical disk now I have: C: physical 150.84 GB(boot, page file, crush dump, primary partition)If so can you please tell me how to do it, never done this before, partitioning, and I don't want to make a mess out of it.
I have windows 7 ultimate installed on my dell Inspiron N5010 machine.I had a preinstalled windows 7 home basic.I have currently 4 partitions:OEMRecovery 1 Primary partition with aorund 250 GB1 extended partition with 2 logical drives.Whats My Problem??Out of the free 225 GB , the maximum available shrinked space available is 128 gb (thats is understable ,due to unmovable files ~hibernation files etc).I shrinked it to maximum capacity to create a new unallocated space of 128 gb.But when I tried to create a simple volume, it gave me an error~You cannot create a new volume in this unallocated partition beacause the disk has already maximum number of partitions.I guess,out of the permissible 4 partitions in disk management without using any 3rd party software,I have used it all.And when I tried to create a new simple volume, it is creating another partition.Real Problem:How to create a logical drive from primary partition??PS:I tried PM, but it gave me a launch error.
the Disk Management program can't manage (extend/shrink/etc.) FAT32 partitions.I don't wish to format NTFS and extend/shrink/etc. an NTFS partition, I want to maintain and alter a partition in FAT32, because my older computer can't read NTFS partitions, and I want it to recognize a partition on this external drive.is there a third party program that works on Win 7 which can give me this ability?alternatively, can the "exFAT" system offered in Disk Management be read by WinME, or is it quite different to FAT32?
I recently enountered siginificant incompatibilities using Partition Magic in Windows 2000 creating a dual boot Windows 2000/Ubuntu Linux system.
I realize that PM must not be used in Vista or Windows 7.
I am planning on having two Windows 7 systems as follows:
1. Dual boot Windows XP Pro/Windows 7 Pro.
2. Dual boot Windows Vista Home Premium/Windows 7 Home.
For the XP system, I could format the partitionss using Partition Magic, run from XP, but if I later wish to add a Linux partition. I'd likely have the same problem I desctibed in the link supra.
For the Vista system, I could format the partitions using Acronis Disk Director 10, run from Vista. Again, this might be complicated by using Disk Director, I do not yet know.
So, what partitioning software is required for the following cases:
1. Dual boot XP/Windows 7
2. Dual boot Vista/Windows 7
3. Triple-boot XP/Windows 7/Ubuntu Linux.
4. Triple boot Vista/Windows 7/Ubuntu Linux
I am asking this same question in a Vista and in an Ubuntu forum.
I've got a 320GB drive on a Vista Premium Home notebook.
Few user files are actually on the notebook, rather the files are on my desktop, and are processed via the network, or temporarily copied to the notebook.
Currently, C drive is 285.04GB with 246GB free.
HP's recovery partition is 13.05GB, with 2.4GB free.
I am going to shrink the C drive, so I can add a separate partition for my own files, this partition could be shared with Windows 7.
How much space should I leave for Windows 7 Home?
I would end up with the following partitions:
C: For Vista
H: For Howard's files
W: For Windows 7 Home
Unallocated: Likely 32GB, in case I wish to add Ubuntu Linux.
D: Recovery partition for HP. I use image backup so this is not really useful.
I know I have did this when I was installing Win 7 and was able to have Win 7 do the partitioning. If possible can some one tell me the screen where i can get into the partitioning phase. I can't find it again to save my life.
I have a Toshiba laptop with 2 partitions- One with windows vista on it and one for backups. I want to join the two partitions and use the Windows 7 Upgrade pack and do a clean installation. How would i go about joining the two partitions? Am i able to use the upgrade version to install it?
I only have one try to install Windows, I want to make sure I know exactly what to do. First of all, which do I install first? Does it matter? Do I have to create the partitions for both when I install the first one?.What I'm going for is a W7 partition used almost solely for Maya (a little gaming too) and a Linux partition for literally everything else.
I have two opreating system installed but in drive D win xp was not working therefore i tried to installed the win xp in drive D and i have already installed a win 7 in Drive C and i encrypt the drive E, F with Bitlocker ..when i install the win xp then win 7 was not reachable and not work correctly then i again installed the win 7 in drive C and want to partition the drive E,F then there was a problem created while in partitioning because i forgot the un encryption of these drives.
I used to have only 1 partition to do everything with. I'm reinstalling windows 7, and I would like to take this chance to partition my drives the correct way to help the computer run faster and waste less memory. I browsed through multiple articles on disk partitioning but I just can't grasp the idea. I'm not too good with computers. Would any be kind enough to explain/teach me how to correctly and efficiently partition my disk?
I set about creating a new simple volume on a brand new laptop today. You know - they come with one giant C: drive. We want a nice, manageable C: drive for imaging, about 75 - 80GB, but 100 or 125 would do.Ran up against the "fixed files" limit on shrinking the volume - could only claim 225GB out of 488GB.I'm wondering- could I (temporarily) turn off the page file, delete all restore points and turn off monitoring, and check for and delete any hibernation files - defrag - and gain some significant ground? Or is a third party partitioning program the only option, as Brink has stated in his tutorials?
I've installed Acronis Disk Director Suite and in manual mode I've started to create a new partition. My notebook had 3 partitions: main partition of ~300Gb with Windows installed, unknown "System" partition with "boot" flag of ~1.5Gb and recovery partition of ~8Gb. So I tried to create a new partition using the free space from the first one. After rebooting Acronis started to work, created a new partition and started to replace "HDDRECOVERY" partition. During this process, notebook had been shutdown (it was plugged into the socket) and after turning on, I noticed the next: after turning on and booting BIOS, the laptop is going to reboot again and again and again.
my pc operating system is installed in c drive which is 25 gb in size, and d drive is 50 gb.is it possible to shrink 5 gb space of d drive and add it to c drive?
This is quite a long story, So let me get straight to the point.On my Dell Optiplex 360 Computer (Windows 7-Ultimate) I partitioned the hard drive to make space for another windows installation. I then installed Windows Vista Ultimate on it.All of that went successfully but after a while it became useless for me and my computer.
There was a time when I had Windows 7 and absolutely adored it.
For certain reasons I tried to go back but fail epically (yes, I'm a teenager!) and now I have two active drive partitions and it's still looking for Windows Seven's bootmgr.w/eand now I need either one of four questions answers so I can get back on my new computer. [(BTW, I am starting to hate the way I need to tweak things.)]
The questions are:If I install windows seven on my usb flash drive (which I tweaked to make the computer look at it like a USBHDD,) will it wipe out the OS on my grandpa's computer? How can I make BIOS look-up and process boot.ini instead? How can I run the Windows Vista install off my FlashHD [as I call it. :P]Is it even possible? Would it work better or, once again, is it possible to install Vista on my flash drive and use it to run on my grandpa's computer. My computer is an Acer AspireOne [I will deservingly accept flaming due to my poorness and poor sense of choice].
I put a clean install of Win 7 onto my laptop and all was well. I went into disk management and shrunk my C: partition a bit to create a new partition.
Having done that, I now cannot boot up. It would seem that something I've done has caused the system reserved partition to become my C: drive and what was C: is now D:! Windows 7 attempts a repair when I boot up, but this fails due to a corrupt registry.
I've put the disk back in to see what that offers and it's here that I noticed that Windows is now on the D: drive. Opening a command prompt confirms how the drive letters have been reassigned.
I'm not 100% sure but assume that it's trying to boot from the system reserved partition and not liking it? I only just installed yesterday so don't mind doing a reinstall if that's the easiest fix, but just wonder if anyone knows what I can do to ensure this doesn't happen again? I presume my partitioning shenanigans are to blame somehow?
I recently purchased a Dell PC with free Windows 7 upgrade. I only installed Mozilla Firefox and Norton Internet 2009 on the PC before I upgraded to Windows 7. I decided to do a custom install from the upgrade DVD so that I could change the partitioning following an article in the November issue of Australin Personal Computer Magazine.
The article said "Windows 7 requires around 10GB of hard drive space. We're planning to keep applications on the same partition as well, so we'll generously add another 20GB, making a 30GB partiition". So during the install process I deleted all the existing partitions, created my partitions with 30GB for the OS. The install process created the system section and everything worked as expected. To my surprise once the install had finished there was 27GB in the C:drive. I assumed it was keeping the old Vista somewhere.
I couldn't find a windows.old folder and in Disk Clean up the button 'Clean up System Files' didnt show for me - there is only one User account and I am the administrator so I didn't know what was causing that problem. So I decided to re-install Windows and increase the OS partition to 40GB - which I did. Only to find that this partitiion is now 35GB full. Again, no windows.old file can be found but the 'Clean up System Files' button appears - but there are no 'Previous Windows Installations' to delete. I decided to bear with it, but already I have a red warning light that the C: drive is nearing capacity.
So I decided to try a third install of Windows 7 and forget the idea of partitioning all together. But now I can only format the OS partition and can not format or delete any other partitions during the custom install process and all my old files were still there after the install. I have formatted the other partitions (i.e. not C now but still they can not be formatted or deleted in anyway through the install process. Windows 7 will not install on any partition other than C:. So it seems this 40GB is all I have for the OS, but it is now full.
Anyone have any ideas what I should do next. I have read everything I can on this site, but the solution seems to be always to delete partitions, which I am unable to do, and format partitions, which I have done (where possible).
If I could solve the problem as to why Windows is now 37GB would resolve my issue, but it is concerning that I can't change the partitioning also.
I am looking to use my 1TB seagate SATA II drive for my Windows 7 installation, and was wondering how I should go about partitioning it and how large each partition should be or what I sould put on each partition.
My system will be used for the following:
Computer Games that take up a lot of space (World In Conflict, Empire Total War, Battlefield 2, Call of Duty, etc.)
Music
Video files/ recordings (I have a Hauppauge tv card)
Some Photos
Basic apps like office
Data files
Which of the above items should I put on the OS partition, and which should get their own partitions? How large should the OS partition be compared to the other partitions? Seperate partition for games?
Having one giant drive might be nice to try, but then I would have no where to put my excess video files if I ever needed to reformat. The 1TB drive accomodates whatever video files I can't store on my 2 smaller drives and currently has 120 GB of video on it.
In addition to my 1TB drive, I also have 2 more internal drives, a 250GB Maxtor ATA which is filled with video files and a 200GB WD SATA that I use for my TV card and storing the recordings I make until I have a chance to edit them or move them to a differet drive.
I have a seperate 250GB external drive for backing up data files and music, so the backup issue is taken care of.
I intend to rebuild my system shortly, mainly reformatting/partitioning my drives. Full system wipe, nothing less will do... Spring Cleaning.
My goal is to have a small Vista partition as a safety net, and optimize my configuration to use Windows 7 as my main OS. I have 2 640gb hdds, one with a 16mb cache, one with 32mb. Both sata and in no sort of raid.
After researching partitioning theory (people take it seriously!), I'd like to try and take advantage of the outer edge of my hard drives, giving my os and page file faster access times.
However, I am unsure of how much control I will have over partitioning my drives from scratch. I would like to assign the following partitions, beginning at the start of each drive (the outside edge):
hdd1(16mb): :/pagefile for windows 7 ~4gb; c:/Vista ~32gb; ...
hdd2(32mb): q:/Windows 7 32~64gb; ...
1. Will this give me any problems? particularly having the first hard drive contain the page file partition before the active system partition?
2. I've read elsewhere windows creates itself a 200gb partition on fresh install, is this forced?
3. Install Vista then Win 7, then which hard drive should I point my bios to for the boot loader?
3a. Assuming I install linux in the future, would I then need to point bios to the drive I put linux/grub on?
other details: running a nVidia 750i mobo with pretty good bios, perhaps providing more flexibility when it comes to boot? Intel core 2 and all that.
I used to have an external hard drive enclosure, and I stored large video files onto its 1 TB capacity. I built a new machine, sold the enclosure and used the same 1 TB hard drive with the UNbacked up files still therein. Obviously I am new to this otherwise I would not have done this. I realized my mistake when I went to install Windows 7 and it said to back up your files.
I read further and discovered the reason was "They will be deleted". I really don't want to loose these files. Is there any way to install the OS without deleting the files. Can I install another OS like Linux, then partition the hard drive, delete linux then install windows 7 onto a partition? WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS! OTHER THAN BUYING ANOTHER HDD ENCLOSURE!
The problem which I faced is the same as the one given below: partitioning problem I bought a new HP laptop which came with 4 partitions all of which are Primary partitions. The c: drive came with a massive 445GB. But I do not want to use the same partition for all my needs so i was thinking of creating another two partitions. So i shrunk c: from the Disk Management leaving 320GB Unallocated space for usage. But when I tried to create a partition from I got the "changing to Dynamic disk" warning. Basically it's similar to the problem faced by the other person in the link posted above.So I followed the post #8n by "Bare Foot Kid" and it went fine, the restarting and all till I tried creating a new volume. See the screenshots below:BTW, I have no idea how it happened but Q: suddenly popped out of nowhere after the "max partitions error".HDD Q HDD Q problem So now I'm clueless.
