Can you change the size of a partition.

Hey everyone, partitioning is new to me. I just did it for the first time today so I could dual boot Vista and XP in a RAID 1 configuration. Everything worked out fine, I just have a simple question.

Is it possible to increase the size of a partition if you have more unpartitioned space on your hard disk?

So for example, if I had a 150GB HD, and 2 50GB partitions, would it be possible to make one of the 50GB partitions into 100GB. Hopefully that makes sense.


Furthermore, say you had a 100GB hard drive and you had two 50GB partitions, would it be possible to change one to 40GB and one to 60GB without rebooting everything?

I would prefer to not have to buy any software to do this (if I would need it in the first place). Thanks for the help!

 

Well, changing partition size, without 3rd party software, and without reformatting, that is impossible. You can do that if you reformat the HDD.

You can resize a partition with 3rd party software. There are two types of software, free (GParted, etc) and commercial (so many, partition magic, acronis, etc). GParted is not perfect, so it might not be able to resize your drive sometimes (I don't know when and why, maybe someone else here knows better). The best software for all this is usually the commercial ones, although I had Partition Magic gave me error that it can't resize once or twice before.

 

Vista has a shrink partition option, if you right click the partition in disk management, under computer management.
Control Panel>Administrative tools>Computer Management>Disk Management.

 

HIren bootcd is a best choice in DOs

 

Hi there , you can use Paragon manager Partition program in CD Hiren's Boot v8.8 or v8.9 to resize partition , don't use partition magic ( it has problem with Windows Vista )

 

Yeah,
I have heard the Partition Magic has killed quite a few of people's partitions that have Vista installed.The Paragon is a much better choice.

 

How about GParted? I am considering buying a machine with Vista preinstalled, and would like to dual-boot it (with some distribution of Ubuntu probably). However, I also don't want to wreck the Vista partition by attempting to resize it.

Is the performance of GParted comparable to Paragon Partition Manager, or is Paragon really about as good as it gets?

 

If Vista uses a standard NTFS partition, GParted should be able to deal with it. GParted works with ntfsresize of course, so you may try googling for ntfsresize + vista and see if you see any bugs there. I refuse to use Vista, so I can only give you pointers, can't tell you anything concrete

 

Cool, thanks for all the replies. I dual booting with XP on a 175GB partition and Vista on a 57GB partition, both in RAID 1. The main reason I have Vista is becuase 1) My friend got a free copy of Vista for participating in the Microsoft Power Together Campaign, and didn't want it and 2) I want to run DX10 games. I appreciate all the input and help. Thanks!