Transferring space from one partition to the other...

[gtfan1235]

How do I go about doing this? I need to transfer about 10GB from my media partition to the partition with windows, games, and other programs. Thanks for any help.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

partition magic.

 

[gtfan1235]

Is there a trustworthy free program?

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

I duno. But I think Partition Magic has a full use demo.

 

[illuminatirex]

is it realy posible to "transfer" that lets say 10gb of free space from one partion to another like the main "C" drive even thou the "c" is a FAT32 and others are NTFS volumes?

 

[SomeJoe7777]

is it realy posible to "transfer" that lets say 10gb of free space from one partion to another like the main "C" drive even thou the "c" is a FAT32 and others are NTFS volumes?

Yes, Partition Magic will let you do this. Esentially, what you do is a mlti-step process:

For example, let's say you have an 80GB drive, with a 40GB C: that's FAT32, and a 40GB D: that's NTFS.

1. Shrink the partition size of the 2nd partition to 30GB. This leaves 10GB free at the end of the drive. (Of course, you have to have 30GB or less data on D: before you can do this).
2. Move the 2nd partition to the end of the drive. This makes the 1st partition 40GB, then a 10GB gap of free space, then the 30GB 2nd partition.
3. Expand the 1st partition to 50GB. This makes the 1st partition 50GB, the 2nd one 30GB.

Since the original partitions are still there, they maintain their same file systems. The 50GB is still FAT32, the 30GB is still NTFS.

 

[illuminatirex]

thx for the info, will definitely look into this since I have about 660mb'sleft on my primary "c"drive and about 90GB on my other drives (I have a oem pc, and i could not change the original space alocation which was only 7gb to the "c" drive), and i still have some msdn libraries to install for my visual C++ compiler that I have just bought.

how long would the proces take, does it depend on the amount of partitions? and their "position" if i have lets say 5 partitions would i have to move that lets say last partion's "freed space" through out all the previous partitions?

is there any risk of having the data lost/hd "messed up"?

thx

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Remember that obviously to move space between partitions like this, the partitions/drive letters have to be on the same physical drive. You cannot, of course, have a single drive letter (C: ) using space from two different physical drives unless you have set up a RAID, or use Windows XP dynamic volumes in span mode. (Windows XP span/RAID modes can't be applied to the boot drive anyway).

Yes, if you have several partitions on your drive, moving the space around can take many individual operations. For example if you need to take space from partition 5 and use it in partition 1, you'll have several operations, because each partition has to be individually moved towards the end of the drive to move the free space towards the front, where partition 1 can then be expanded.

The time it takes to do all the moving depends on the amount of data to be moved, the speed of the hard drive, and the speed of the controller card or motherboard chipset when operating under INT13 operation (which is typically slower than when operating using 32 bit drivers under Windows). Typical operations that I've seen on standard, modern IDE drives take about 1 hour per 75GB of data. Newer drives that are very large capacity (>250GB) are faster due to their density.

Partition Magic does a full chkdsk on your partitions before and after all of its operations, so it does a good job of maintaining data integrity. The only time I've had a problem with it is when I had a power failure during a partiton resize. File system was b0rked beyond repair. Had to reformat. These days, I put systems on a UPS prior to doing a major operation like that.

 

[illuminatirex]

Thx again for the information, i was planing to move some space on one (physicly one and the same hard drive) , i found one 60gb partition next to my c drive which has about 50gb's free, so i gues i would move about 5 gb to the c drive, considering that i have always had only 7 gb on the "c" drive(since i had this ps, which is soon going to be 6 years now) that aditional 5 gb will be quite a nice change, i used the administrative tools/computer management/disk management to see what partition is next to the "c" drive on my hd, so i gues that should be precise.

is it advised to do a defragmentation of the partitions prior to using the Partition Magic?(i would asume that Yes it is, if we are moving "empty" space from the end of the drive/partition, or it does not mater.

Thank You

 

[SomeJoe7777]

I'd recommend the defrag afterwards. In some cases, doing the defrag before the moving & resizing can cause those operations to take longer.

 

[illuminatirex]

Thank you for the information, i was wrong then. Aprecieate all the help, now i will atleast have more space on my "c" drive, and will not have to wory about haveing "not enough" space to install software even thou i have a lot of space on other partitions, thank You again for all the help.