T42: Remove IBM Service Partition with Acronis Migrate Easy

[Paul Pennington]

I'd like to remove the IBM Service Partition to free up 5-odd Gigabytes. I have Acronis Migrate Easy and have used it to transfer everything from one hard drive to another. I can't figure out how to transfer the main partition and not the IBM Service Partition. Is that even possible? (I also can't figure out how to contact Acronis support.) Both hard drives are identical 60GB Hitachi's, with the second drive in the optical drive bay. Running Windows XP with all the latest updates.

Paul Pennington
Augusta, Georgia

[Paul Pennington]

Since nobody here seems to know this, I thought I would reply to my own message with the answer I found.

As I suspected, Acronis Migrate Easy cannot resize partitions. I ordered Acronis Disk Director 11 Home CD, and it arrived this afternoon thanks to Amazon Prime. $29.90 Took only a few minutes to remove the IBM Service Partition and add the unallocated space to the main partition. Everything works fine with no data lost. I didn't even have to install it -- runs from the CD.

I also got an email from the Acronis tech support dummy reiterating that Acronis makes no product that will resize a partition without data loss. Hard to believe that a company smart enough to write great software like this would hire overseas support mills to turn away prospective customers.

[Non-Thinker]

I had a very similar problem with my T43. I use and like Acronis products, but I was able to move things around nicely with a free program called MiniTool Partition Wizard, which anybody can download from CNET here:

http://download.cnet.com/MiniTool-Parti ... tag=button

It took several operations to delete partitions and move things around, and I had to reboot several times, but it all went very smoothly and the result is perfect.