Re: Hard Drive partitions

I wouldn't bother about it too much, it's only 8 megabytes, for all intents and purposes the C: drive already has just about the whole disk to itself.

You can probably delete the extended partition, it is probably just an empty container, it probably doesn't contain any logical drives. Just boot to the Windows 2000 installation and use the Disk Management tool to have another look at the disk, you can explore the partition and see what it holds. If it isn't the System or Boot partition you can delete it with the Disk Management tool.

I see that you installed BootItNG, that was not necessary. You can uninstall it, if you don't remove it when the trial period is over it will start to nag you every time you start the computer, at first it will be a short nag but as time goes by the nag time will be increasingly longer. You can do partitioning work without installing the program, when you boot with it at the installation screen just click on "Cancel" and the program will go to the Maintenance Mode and you will be able to do partitioning work.

You will never be able to reclaim the last free "Volume" 8 megabytes, Windows 2000 reserves this space for the use of Dynamic Disks.

John

Ushnell wrote:

Hey there John! Thank you for referring me to using BootItNG to solve that partition crisis I was having. I have been using it to delete those useless partitions to merge the space of them to the C:\ drive but there's something I need your help on if you have used BootItNG yourself. Here's the current rundown of my partitions.

MBR ENTRY 0 Partition 9766 MB FAT-32
MBR ENTRY 1 Partition 8 MB EXTENDED
--------------- Volume 8 MB Free Space
BootIt EMBR Partition 8 MB BootIt EMBRM

As you can see, there's now only 8 megs left to allocate to the c:\ drive but I can't seem to do it because the resize feature won't allow the size of the extended partition to be set to 0 in space outside. one thing that I feel warned about is if I delete the Extended partition then the volumes will be lost which a dialog screen warns about. Is this common in using BootItNG to edit partitions? look at the rundown above and see how you can help. Thanks!
Ushnell Fenell


"John John" wrote:


Ushnell wrote:

I just bought a used Gateway computer from a neighbor and I've bumped into a problem that's causing myself to ask: what the hell was this person thinking!

The Gateway contains Windows 2000 on it on a 9.52 or 10.00 Gigabyte hard drive but the big mistake he made is that he created three other partitions on the basic disk of the drive and the main drive C:\ where Windows stores the software files is the one that's loosing all the storage space and the rest are all beefed up.

I've tried to fix this problem using Disk Management in the Administrative Tools section of the control panel and tried to see what happens by deleting the E:\ partition. I taught the free space would go to the C:\ drive but the computer considers it as free space.

As you can see here, what I would like do to is transfer the space of those partitions to the C:\ drive. any help would be appreciated.

Ushnell

You will have to use third party tools to do this, it cannot be done with any of the built-in Windows 2000 tools. Utilities like Partition Magic, Acronis Disk Director or BootItNG can do this for you. All of the above are commercial "pay for" utilities but Terabyte's BootItNg is small (fits on a floppy), well proven and free to use for 30 days. You don't need to install it to use it, you simply boot the computer with it and at the installation screen you cancel the install and the utility enters a maintenance mode where you will be able to do the partitioning work.

You should be warned that while these utilities work very well and are for most part trouble free, any glitch while doing partitioning work can cause catastrophic data loss. A power failure while repartitioning the drive will almost certainly lead to complete loss of all the data on the disk, user errors can also lead to complete loss of data. Although these complete data losses are rare, they do happen on occasion, if you have valuable files on the disk make sure you have a backup before you do any partitioning work!

John

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