Resizing partitions 'on the fly' - what's best app?

Got a 20gb drive split equally into C and D.

C is almost full (84mb free) and the system is complaining.

I've mounted the drive in another computer and I thought I'd try shifting the partition boundary to enlarge C (D has about 5gb free)

Any recommendations for best app to use? I routinely use Partition Magic for partition deletion and secure erasing but never attempted resizing with it. PM is generally a good prog but does have its odd little quirks.

Suggestions would be welcome

 

You'll not find anything better than PM.

It's always a good idea to backup all critical data before doing any partition resizing.

The biggest worry would be a power failure occuring during the process - not very likely but it has happened.

 

Thanks, surferdude2. PM it is.

I'll clone the drive onto a spare and work on the copy, so it won't matter if it screws up.

Cheers

 

While I'm not discouraging your decision to resize partitions, I am rather curious as to why you don't just move some things from C: to D: to free up space.

 

Noahdfear - I tried that first of all. But there's so little space left on C that it seems to be affecting all operations, particularly file movement. I shifted one folder of 350mb from C to D, but after it had moved, C didn't register the size change, so even though the folder appears to have moved to D, C hasn't got any smaller.

And it won't accept a scan or defrag, even in safe mode.

So I'm not sure what's going on. Just another glitch in the matrix, methinks

 

Did you try running disk cleanup?

Since you have a spare drive, there's also the option of moving data there. Have you run any type of utility to see what exactly is using what space? SpaceMonger v1.4.0 is a small free standalone that will show you exactly what is using the space on your drive. A 10GB partition with XP on it doesn't allow a whole lot for programs, especially if you also have quite a few pics or music files. May find that uninstalling a couple of programs, then re-installing them to the other partition might make a lot of difference. Bear in mind that many apps won't remove all of their files when uninstalled and you may have to do some cleanup on c: to see any difference.

BTW, I recently noticed a huge folder of temp files on my drive, using SpaceMonger, that disk cleanup hadn't removed, located at WINDOWS\Internet Logs. Might want to have a look in there

 

Thanks Steve and Noah.

Actually, I've got most of the hard drive management and imaging apps. For cloning drives, I always use Acronis True Image or Acronis Migrate Easy. For imaging I use True Image, but I've had some weird results from imaging so if I occasionally weaken and image an important drive as a kind of insurance, it's always with fingers crossed and a fervent wish that I never have to recover the image.

Partition Magic I've found to be a little flaky at times. I use it to 'Delete and Secure Erase' partitions, but I ran into one of it's odd little quirks in this process I'm posting about.

My cloning method goes like this: I take the target drive and mount it in a workshop pc, then run PM to delete and secure erase anything on the drive. This process leaves the drive showing an 'unallocated' label. (If the drive is brand new, this step in unnecessary of course, and it can be used as a clone destination without further work).

Then I shut down, add the source drive to the mix (I never have more drives than necessary mounted in case of accidents) and run TrueImage or MigrateEasy to clone the source drive to the unallocated unit. It doesn't matter if the drives aren't the same size, as long as the amount of data on the source doesn't exceed the space on the target.

Never had a glitch with this process, it works very well.

However, in the job I'm describing now, the clone target ended up with two partitions, C and D.

This where it gets a little complicated. I've had to re-do this job about four times so far (for reasons which I think are related to the OS), so when I go back to PM to delete and erase and start again, I end up with TWO unallocated drives.

Acronis prefers a clone target with only ONE unallocated drive, no matter how many partitions are contained in the source. But Partition Magic balks at removing ONE of the two, as it won't select a partition once it's been unallocated.

However, I found that XP's drive management facility WILL do this, so that's what I had to do to get the bare drive back to a single unallocated partition and ready for another clone attempt.

Regarding the three or four failures I've had so far with this job, I don't think it's anything to do with the cloning; I think I may have fouled up the source drive at the very beginning, when I used ERD Commander to remove the user and Admin passwords, as I couldn't contact the owner at the time to find out what they were, so I reset them. I've reset passwords in this fashion many times without problems but in this case, the process didn't seem to go normally.

What happens now is that after the cloning, the target drive boots up with no problems, except for reporting that 'Windows has recovered from a serious error'. Following the NEXT boot, it crashes, reporting that 'Windows can't continue 'cos windows\sys32\config is missing or corrupt'. (This is from memory - I think you'll know the message I mean)

So that's where I'm currently at - the operation seems to have been successful but the patient died

Incidentally, I managed to find an answer to my original question, which was 'how to alter partition sizes on the fly?' Paragon's Partition Manager 8.5 did the job, altering the target drive from C10-D10 to C12-D8.

However, this 'partition stretching' wouldn't have been necessary if either Acronis True Image or Acronis Migrate Easy were capable of doing the biz during the cloning. I mean, how much easier would it have been if I could have cloned the C partition to a 12mb space instead of the 10mb that's restricting to OS? But no, neither app seems to be able to provide that elasticity.

(I guess it's always possible that the partition rearrangement might have contributed to, or caused, the OS error, but it does manage to boot once. Weird.... )

Noah, thanks for the tip about Space Monger, I'll try it.

I find Tree Size a great little free app for checking out space consumption. For cleaning out temps and junk (select ALL), I personally use ATF Cleaner every few days on my own pcs.