De-partitioning a hard drive
Discussion
Hi, I have an Acer laptop with a 60 gig hardrive, which came partioned from new.
I have a 30 gig ipod. On another thread I expressed surprise at how geeky these ipods seem to be, a statement which seemed to attract quite a bit of ridicule. However, it seems to be official that if your music collection is larger than your ipod capacity or vice-versa, you will have trouble with your ipod. There are ways round this, but I'd be happier using my laptop.
So, I wish to load itunes onto my laptop, but this gives me the option of either running it on the C drive, which even after emptying the drive of all photos and other large files, still doesn't leave me with anything like 30 gig spare, or loading itunes onto the D drive, which is the partitioned other half of the c drive. Trouble is, I suspect that itunes will not like not being on the c drive, plus its imperative to have the music backed up, and it seems it must be backed up in My Music on the C drive. What I do know is that if I make one mistake, I lose all the music on the ipod. You get no warnings, no dialogue boxes saying something like "This action will cause your ipod hardrive to be overwritten do you wish to continue?" Nope, the first you know of it is that your 30 gig ipod suddenly has 28 gig capacity again, just as it did when new.
So, to be able to use itunes and my ipod via my laptop, I reckon I need to de-partition the laptops hardrive. And people say ipods/itunes aren't geeky? If it was a normal mp3 player I'd have none of this.
Anyway, the partitioned hard drive has been a nuicance in the past - I've been downloading videos onto it or the like, only to run out of space and have to switch to the d drive. I don't know why it was partitioned from the start, can't see the benefits, can I departition it without losing exsisting files - although that won't be a hardship - and if so, how do I do it?
I have a 30 gig ipod. On another thread I expressed surprise at how geeky these ipods seem to be, a statement which seemed to attract quite a bit of ridicule. However, it seems to be official that if your music collection is larger than your ipod capacity or vice-versa, you will have trouble with your ipod. There are ways round this, but I'd be happier using my laptop.
So, I wish to load itunes onto my laptop, but this gives me the option of either running it on the C drive, which even after emptying the drive of all photos and other large files, still doesn't leave me with anything like 30 gig spare, or loading itunes onto the D drive, which is the partitioned other half of the c drive. Trouble is, I suspect that itunes will not like not being on the c drive, plus its imperative to have the music backed up, and it seems it must be backed up in My Music on the C drive. What I do know is that if I make one mistake, I lose all the music on the ipod. You get no warnings, no dialogue boxes saying something like "This action will cause your ipod hardrive to be overwritten do you wish to continue?" Nope, the first you know of it is that your 30 gig ipod suddenly has 28 gig capacity again, just as it did when new.
So, to be able to use itunes and my ipod via my laptop, I reckon I need to de-partition the laptops hardrive. And people say ipods/itunes aren't geeky? If it was a normal mp3 player I'd have none of this.
Anyway, the partitioned hard drive has been a nuicance in the past - I've been downloading videos onto it or the like, only to run out of space and have to switch to the d drive. I don't know why it was partitioned from the start, can't see the benefits, can I departition it without losing exsisting files - although that won't be a hardship - and if so, how do I do it?
This may not be the perfect link but Diskpart.exe from Microsoft will do this for free:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BCB9100D-698F-40A3-BF53-692D793C6E4F&displaylang=en
If you've not done this sort of thing before make sure you've a backup of data and print out the instructions.
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BCB9100D-698F-40A3-BF53-692D793C6E4F&displaylang=en
If you've not done this sort of thing before make sure you've a backup of data and print out the instructions.
heebeegeetee said:
Anyway, the partitioned hard drive has been a nuicance in the past - I've been downloading videos onto it or the like, only to run out of space and have to switch to the d drive. I don't know why it was partitioned from the start, can't see the benefits
The idea is you use the D: drive for your data from the outset. Sadly windows is very "My documents" orentated and most users don't know how to put them on the D: partition. Good article here
www.techsupportalert.com/how_to_move_my_documents.htm
The down side is that in this instance C: and D: are on the same physical unit, so the HDD has to work much harder.
It's also really handy at the arse end. I've sorted out so many clients and friends with consumer level machines which have brutal image based recovery disks. If you can just grind the machine into life, however crufted it may be, even off a Dos Image on a CD, you can copy most of the users stuff onto the D partition, and then apply the recovery. So it's actually really, really handy.
I don't do it, I know what I'm doing, I assume you do too, but if you don't, and most consumers don't, these are the benfits.
heebeegeetee said:
can I departition it without losing exsisting files - although that won't be a hardship - and if so, how do I do it?
As mentioned above, partition magic is well rated, but I've never used it. If you can backup or lose what's currently on the disk I'd just fire up the disks you got with the machine, if you get a dos option great use fdisk, and then install afresh.
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