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Extending a boot partition--is it possible?
Shadowen
Snores in the morningLoserdomRegistered User regular
Snores in the morningLoserdomRegistered User regular
I got a new hard drive for Christmas, and decided to go with a partitioned OS. I chose 60 GB (that was the upper range I saw in one article on the subject) for the OS's partition. Apparently that was not enough for Windows 7 Pro, as I haven't quite gotten all my updates and I'm down to less than 4 gigs space. (Should have waited for my cousin's advice; he belatedly told me to do 100).
Here are my partitions as they are now.
There's 16 gigs there on the left and I should be able to extend into that (unless you can only extend to the right?), but I can't. The OS partition is also the boot volume, and from what I've read you can't extend a boot partition in Windows 7's Disk Manager.
I have, however, seen that there are programs that can add unallocated space from anywhere on the disk to a partition, and supposedly onto a boot volume. AOMEI's Partition Assistant, EaseUs, Partition Manager, etc. Has anyone done this with any of these programs, and if so how did it go? Or is there a way to do it just through Windows's built-in tools?
Here are my partitions as they are now.
There's 16 gigs there on the left and I should be able to extend into that (unless you can only extend to the right?), but I can't. The OS partition is also the boot volume, and from what I've read you can't extend a boot partition in Windows 7's Disk Manager.
I have, however, seen that there are programs that can add unallocated space from anywhere on the disk to a partition, and supposedly onto a boot volume. AOMEI's Partition Assistant, EaseUs, Partition Manager, etc. Has anyone done this with any of these programs, and if so how did it go? Or is there a way to do it just through Windows's built-in tools?
Shadowen on
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they usually work flawlessly when the partitions/unallocated spaces are adjacent
it gets dicey if, say, you wanted to use that 42 gb in the F volume
just as an fyi, make everything on a single disk one partition unless there's a real need to split it up, chances are you're going to nuke the secondary partitions when you do a format by accident at some point
get an external drive to move steam stuff/documents back and forth
much, much less grief in the end (I used to do that stuff too)
you run into other issues like installers almost always using some part of the "C:" drive to store their data (and the registry) so even at your best efforts 100 gigs will slowly melt away.
I installed visual studio to my platter drive once to save space and found out it still took something like 20 gigs on my C drive for "reasons".
So there's no real way to merge F and G without doing a total reformat?
the system partition fucks it up
partition software might be able to do it, depending on how much free space is available on the drive
but yeah
nuke from orbit is the simplest and less hassle and will take the least amount of time
I split my main drive and I've literally never done this, or had a problem with it.
Its saved endless headaches, as long as you don't mash your keyboard with a cured ham while you do rare reinstalls :rotate:
Personally I split between windows and everything else. Installed programs go on the non-windows, Sure if windows borks and has to be reinstalled..you'll have to reinstall the programs, but you wont lose any precious data stored away in their folders.