Disk Partitioning SNAFU

[ArtShapiro]

Nothing whatsoever to do with Thinkpads, but there are lots of practical and smart folks out there, so:

I recently installed Win 7 on my primary desktop machine. I took a 750 gig drive, partitioned it roughly in two (350 gigs C: for Windows, the rest for D:), and have been happily running for a couple weeks without incident.

Until last night, when, to my horror, I discovered that I'd somehow dropped the proverbial zero and the C: partition wasn't 350 gigs - it is 35 gigs! And the D: partition is more than 700 gigs.

I went into the disk management console, and found that I could shrink D: with no problems. But I can't expand C: .

As both partitions are backed up to a Windows Home Server machine, as are all my Thinkpads, I suppose I could simply purge and repartition the disk and restore from the WHS machine. This is just a little scary, because if something goes wrong I'm in a heap of trouble. I'd rather do something - if possible - that leaves things resident on the disk.

Any wild ideas out there?

Art

[wearetheborg]

If you had data on the 350GB XP partition, a lot of it has probably been lost due to win 7 overwriting it.
I will assume you dont care about that data. This is using the gparted tool.
Option one: you shrink the win 7 partition and make another partition say E: which will be accessible from XP.
Option two: you nuke win 7, delete that partition, and expand the XP partition to 350GB (can be done with gparted CD).
Option three: You actually "move" the win 7 partition to create space for XP (and then expand the XP partition). You will need to check if there are any issues involved with booting windows if this is done

[ArtShapiro]

I have to thoroughly digest your message, but let me clarify:

XP is gone forever - another physical disk now sitting on a shelf.

C: is the Windows 7 partition, whereas D: is just a general partition for data and stuff. It really doesn't have much on it, and that stuff could easily be offloaded temporarily.

Could I do that, nuke D:, remove it as a partition, expand C: to incorporate the entire disk, and then repartition back into half C: and half D: ?

Art

[Vempele]

Yes, though it's needlessly complicated. Why don't you just shrink D:, create a new 350GB partition and copy D's contents to it, delete D: and expand C:?

[ArtShapiro]

Yes, though it's needlessly complicated. Why don't you just shrink D:, create a new 350GB partition and copy D's contents to it, delete D: and expand C:?

Now that sounds even better...thanks to both of you. Doing it natively rather than with a third-party product is great.

Art

[NorrisCell]

GParted should be able to shrink one partition and expand another without issue. I've done it before when I miscalculated the space I would need for another OS. Be prepared to give it plenty of time, but it can be done without creating or destroying any existing partitions.

[ArtShapiro]

Didn't need GPARTED; native functionality worked fine as suggested. A handful of minutes and my disk was basically half/half C: / D: and has been running without incident.

Art