Need a suitable replacement for old "Partition Magic" software. Little help?

[Jack T. Chance]

About a year ago, I bought a new laptop from Gateway, and it's a great machine except for one little thing that I hate: The hard drive was set-up as 2 partitions. And now the partition with Windows on it has less than 15% free space remaining.

I want to remove the partition, and make it just one big hard drive, like it should be, WITHOUT having to reformat, reinstall Windows Vista, and then reinstall all my software.

Once upon a time, that task was easy: Just use a program called Partition Magic and you could remove that unwanted partition. Piece of cake.

And then the company that made Partition Magic was bought by the Evil Empire, AKA Symantec. As a result, there have been no program updates released in over 5 YEARS, because Symantec has this bad habit of buying up little software companies that make really useful software, and then letting that software product die once they own it! Thanks to Symantec, there is not now, nor will there ever be, a new version of Partition Magic that is compatible with Windows Vista... or the upcoming Windows 7, for that matter.

So, what can I do here? Anyone know of a Vista-compatible program that does what Partition Magic used to do?!?

[lordlundar]

I used EASUS Partition Manager to partition my main drive for dual booting. I'm not sure if it will work in Vista, but it's worth a shot. Best of all, its free.

[Jack T. Chance]

I used EASUS Partition Manager to partition my main drive for dual booting. I'm not sure if it will work in Vista, but it's worth a shot. Best of all, its free.

Cool, free is definitely good! I'll look into that one. Thanks.

EDIT: Just took a look... it only supports the 32-BIT version of Windows Vista, and my laptop is a 64-bit machine.

Looks like I need the Professional Edition for a 64-bit OS, and that runs about $32 right now. But I might do some more checking around, see if I can find it any cheaper than that.

[Broomjockey]

You're in luck. Vista has a built-in partition manager.

http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/02/...-windows-vista

That's what you'll need to fix it. One word of warning, though.

When it shows you the disks, keep in mind you can only extend disks to the right.

In other words, if it goes "Disk 1 | Disk 2" and you erase disk 2, you can extend Disk 1. But if you erase Disk 1, you can't extend Disk 2. It won't shuffle the data to the left.

[Jack T. Chance]

You're in luck. Vista has a built-in partition manager.

http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/02/...-windows-vista

That's what you'll need to fix it. One word of warning, though.

When it shows you the disks, keep in mind you can only extend disks to the right.

In other words, if it goes "Disk 1 | Disk 2" and you erase disk 2, you can extend Disk 1. But if you erase Disk 1, you can't extend Disk 2. It won't shuffle the data to the left.

Wow! I had no idea it was built-in! That's cool!

And yeah, the Windows install is on Disk 1, so it should work fine for what I need to do. Thanks!

[Eric the Grey]

Be aware that with most laptops, the secondary partition is the restore partition, which is what you use to recover your OS and originally installed Apps in the even of a major problem (not including a failed disk).

Make certain you have a way to recover your machine before you do this!!!


Eric the Grey

[Broomjockey]

Be aware that with most laptops, the secondary partition is the restore partition,

Heh, my laptop shipped with THREE partitions.

"Restore|OS|Random 5GB Partition with nothing on it." As far as I'm aware, usually the restore partition is left-most, so you wouldn't be able to extend to it anyways.

[Mikkel]

Heh, my laptop shipped with THREE partitions.

"Restore|OS|Random 5GB Partition with nothing on it." As far as I'm aware, usually the restore partition is left-most, so you wouldn't be able to extend to it anyways.

Mine is the same. It now has four partitions. The fourth I made with Ubuntus boot-cd, I didn't know that Vista came with its own partition manager .

[Jack T. Chance]

Be aware that with most laptops, the secondary partition is the restore partition, which is what you use to recover your OS and originally installed Apps in the even of a major problem (not including a failed disk).

Make certain you have a way to recover your machine before you do this!!!


Eric the Grey

Thanks for the reminder. I should be good. My Gateway gaming laptop came with a Windows Vista Restore/Reinstall disc, and then on the hard drive was a disc image for the Applications and Drivers Recovery Disc. I promptly burned that disc image to a DVD-R, so I have physical recovery discs should anything go wrong.

I haven't decided yet when I'll play around with Vista's Partition Manager. I may do a little more research into its functions and make absolutely sure it'll do what I want it to do before I mess around with it.

[MadMike]

As someone already pointed out, Vista, and I believe Win7 will allow you to change partitions from inside Windows. However, if you ever find yourself dealing with XP or prior, Gparted works quite well.

I used it when I was playing around with a beta version of Win7. I was able to split my drive into two partitions, and then change it back to a single partition after the beta expired.