Trying to resize partitions

[MadMike]

When I upgraded from XP to Win7, I split my 1 terrabyte hard drive into two equal partitions, and installed XP on the one and Win7 on the other. As I've been using Win7 more and XP less, my Win7 partition has been filling up, while the XP parition has been staying mostly empty.

I decided to shrink the XP partition and expand the Win7 one. I know you can't resize the partition your using under XP, but I could have sworn you could do it with Win7. I was able to shrink the XP partition by about 200 GB, but when I tried to expand the Win7 partition, the "expand" option was grayed out.

Can anyone help?

[Gerrinson]

Windows really doesn't like altering the size of the boot partition. In fact, neither do a number of the 3rd party options available. I have a software at home that worked quite will with mine, but I can't recall the name right now.

If I remember, I'll pull it tonight and post the name for you.

[MadMike]

Last time I had to do it, I used GParted. Not having much luck with it this time. It's not letting me expand the partition.

[lordlundar]

Last time I had to do that I used EASUS Partition Manager. Worked really well.

Best bet for doing it is to deal with the adjust in the OS that it's in. So in you're case, you're reducing the XP and expanding the Win 7. So you'd install it in XP, then shrink the XP partition while in XP. Leave the raw space alone for the time being. Then load up the Win7 OS and expand the Win7 partition while running that OS.

I really hope I explained it well enough. It's so much easier for me to show what I mean.

[MadMike]

Thanks, LL! I can't be 100% sure yet, but it looks like it will do the trick. It let me increase the size of my Win7 partition, something none of the others would do. However, before I hit "OK", the disclaimer at the bottom that advised me to backup my data started to get to me. So now I'm copying my entire drive to my media server before I continue, just in case. It will supposedly take anywhere from 6 1/2 hours to a day.

[lordlundar]

Thanks, LL! I can't be 100% sure yet, but it looks like it will do the trick. It let me increase the size of my Win7 partition, something none of the others would do. However, before I hit "OK", the disclaimer at the bottom that advised me to backup my data started to get to me. So now I'm copying my entire drive to my media server before I continue, just in case. It will supposedly take anywhere from 6 1/2 hours to a day.

Good plan. I've only done it myself on fresh rebuilds so I tended to not have an issue (nor would care apart from the 3-6 hours I would need to redo the rebuild if something did go wrong), but it never hurts to make sure.

[MadMike]

It's running now. Taking a long time because of all the data on my drive. And it's a good thing I did back up all my stuff, because we had an ice storm last night, and it knocked the power out at least 3 times. If that would have happened while this was running, my drive would have most likely been blown.

[Mycroft]

When I set things up like that, I try to set up [OS 1 partition][OS2 partition][data drive] (or other things like /swap, /home, ...) and then try as hard as possible to not put anything on the OS partitions that isn't OS (yes, Windows sucks at that, as *everything* thinks it needs to be in C:\Program Files\...)

OTOH, as the first thing I do with a new laptop is dump in livecd, GParted the hell out of the drive back to reasonable parameters for the Microsoft Tax partition (hey, I paid for it, I might as well have it available), and then install Linux flavour of the week in the rest, it's no extra work.

UPSes in winter are your friend (if the power goes out for hours at a time, you're out of luck, but for the 2 minute drops, it's amazing).

The other option that comes to mind in your case, given that you are moving more to "windows 7, unless I need something from my old XP box", you might decide you want to virtualize the XP "computer", and have it available for your as a VM on Win7 (and then it's not a partition problem, it's a "disk size" problem, and that's configurable "on the fly"). VMWare Converter will happily virtualize the box; you can then run it in VMWare Server (or spend the effort to convert it again to VirtualBox (or Microsoft's VM, if you're willing to pay something)), and once that works, you can just let Win7 use the whole drive.

I don't know how much of this is "I know that already" - sorry for anything that sounds too much "look, idiot, I have used a computer before". Good Luck!

[Andara Bledin]

When I set things up like that, I try to set up [OS 1 partition][OS2 partition][data drive] (or other things like /swap, /home, ...) and then try as hard as possible to not put anything on the OS partitions that isn't OS (yes, Windows sucks at that, as *everything* thinks it needs to be in C:\Program Files\...)

I did this with my last system. It actually had physically separate drives, but I kept the OS drive free of anything that wasn't OS and would allow me to put it somewhere other than the main drive.

^-.-^