Matthew on 15/11/2009 at 20:04
Being the sort of person who clutters up his hard drive on a regular basis, I now find myself in the following position with my drives:
Inline Image:
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u73/Matthew_Morrison/harddisks.jpgFor clarity:
D: (Central) is my old XP installation
E: (Redale) is storage / program files only, and currently mostly empty
L: (Galactica) is a new hard drive and currently completely empty
F: (Eva) is my Vista OS partition
H: (Wintermute) is where all my Vista programs and some Win 7 programs were installed
C: (Calistarius) is the Windows 7 OS partition
G: (Neuromancer) is another storage / program files drive and currently mostly empty
MY QUESTION: can I use and program to copy the partitions for D, E and G on to the new hard drive (Disk 2) so that I can consolidate them all on Disks 2 and 3, then remove the old 250Gb drives?
I tried simply deactivating Disks 1 and 4, but ended up getting the 'NTLDR is missing' error. Disk 0 is the system partition so I'm not sure if I can move it at all - I tried to copy it to Disk 2 (hence the 232.88Gb unallocated area) but it did not receive the system partition attribute.
Would something like GParted or Partition Magic let me do this without fucking up the multi-boot situation? I can use GParted to an extent for simple jobs, but this is a bit beyond me.
Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any advice.
TBE on 15/11/2009 at 20:48
(
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm) Easus Partition Manager. I've used this free tool for a couple years now. Works, as well as, or better than Partition Magic that I spent money on. Easier install too. edit-ok, you can use the feature called "Partition Copy" to move your partitions in this program. You can also use the program below. Either way is about the same.
3rd edit -Maybe you need a different program to move partitions. I use Acronis (
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/) True Image. There's a free trial program on this page that will move your partitions to different hard drives. I've used it a lot, and it works great. It's primarily a backup program for your system, but is also good for things like partition moves. This is ok, or the top software "Partition Copy" feature of Easus
Matthew on 19/11/2009 at 18:31
Thanks very much for your advice TBE! Will those programs be able to copy the system attribute and boot files OK, do you know?
TBE on 19/11/2009 at 18:46
Yeah, they don't copy file by file, they IMAGE the entire partition. It's like a photograph of an entire file cabinet, rather than just copying each piece of paper contained within. I'd probably have to recommend EASUS as being easiest. Just use the "PARTITION COPY" for each partition. Do them one at a time. Once it's moved to it's new location, remove old partition, and copy the next. It's good that you have explicit names of your partitions. Just remember the drive name of the new disk you add so you don't delete the new copied partition instead of the old one with the same name.
Renzatic on 19/11/2009 at 18:56
My question is how did you end up with so many partitions?
"One day me and the boys were busy getting drunk on cheap fortified wine, and I thought 'hey guys! I got a great idea! Lets build us a server farm!'. Well considering we were drunk, we didn't exactly build a server farm. Just this one computer with 10 harddrives and 50 partitions. One partition had nothing but 30 gig worth of pictures of sea otters on it. How the hell that happened I have NO idea. Anyway, I got a problem that needs fixing..."
Matthew on 20/11/2009 at 12:58
It looks worse than it is :p
* The D: drive is one partition of 250Gb and is where XP was installed.
* E: was my second hard drive, also 250Gb, for extra space.
* G: is a third 250Gb hard drive that was originally supposed to replace the HD in my old computer prior to its sale, but as it didn't quite pan out I just wiped the old computer's drive and, having nowhere else to put the new 250Gb drive, plonked it in here as G:.
* Using student discount I bought a cheap copy of Vista (after trying a free student version through my computer classes) and a new 1Tb hard drive to put both it and my growing collection of DVD rips on, leading to the creation of F: for Vista itself and H: as the rest of the drive space.
* Finally, L: is another 1Tb hard drive bought with the intention of shifting the XP installation onto it and yanking out the 250Gb drives to leave only the two 1Tb ones. That's proving more difficult than I expected!
KoHaN69 on 28/11/2009 at 01:43
Also
Since you have multiple physical hard disks, I highly recommend installing each operating system to a separate hard disk as the first partition.
Remember: Programmers are stupid and lazy every Windows should always see itself as C:\ , with the default folder (C:\WINDOWS\) for xp, C:\WINNT for 2000, or whatever.
Even big-company driver makers seem to forget what %SYSTEMROOT% is. :sweat:
