New Partitions On A Fully-Allocated Drive
Hi, fellow New Englander. I am and have been a Plus reader for ages. I just bought a Dell Inspiron with an 80 GB hard drive running WinXP Professional. I want to partition it, and followed the instructions in your 2/27/06 article in InformationWeek. But, when I open to Disk Management, I cannot find "an unallocated region of the basic disk" to right click for a new partition. The disk O has a 63MB section, a C drive with 72.36GB NTFS section and ends with a 3.10GB Fat32 section.
Can you explain where the unallocated region is and/or how I can navigate to it?
I do have PM 8.0 on another Dell 8100 and it works fine. I was trying not to use it on the new Dell. Thanks, Dick Varone, Cranston, RI
We touched on this briefly in a recent issue ( http://langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-03-06.htm#1 ), but here's a bit more detail: If all the space on your hard drive is in use, then there is no unallocated area--- it's all been allocated and is in use. But you can still create a new partition:
Back up your data. Defrag everything. Pick an existing partition that can afford to lose some space (shrink). Using the Disk Management tool, delete that partition; that partition's space will now show as unallocated space. Use the Disk Management tool to create two (or more) new partitions in the space where the one deleted partition used to be. Reboot, and then restore the deleted partition's backed-up data to wherever you want it to go.
Note that more sophisticated tools like BootIt and Partition Magic let you resize a partition "on the fly," shrinking a "live" partition to create unallocated space that can be turned into a new partition. But either way, the idea is to use the space from one large existing partition to create two (or more) new partitions whose total size adds up to that of the original, deleted partition.
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