How to partition Hard Drive without formatting?

[David Cane]

I have just got Partition Magic 3, and I want to change my Single Partition 8.4Gb drive into a Dual Partition Drive. 1.5 Gb and 6.9 Gb.
Currently I have 3.2 Gb Free on this drive. Partition Magic only gives me the options to format the single 8.4 Gb partition.

Do I have to re-size the current partition? If so how?

Thanks

David Cane

[dh]

Well I asked nearly the exact question here:
http://www.hardware.pairnet.com/cgi-bin/messageboard/webboardfast.exe?index=1

The answer I got was to get Partition Magic 4, because it will partion "on the fly"
I'm going to see if I can download the upgrade.
Later......

[Scott Evans]

Remember- three primary partitions maximum in the DOS world. An Extended partition (which contains all logical partitions) is a primary, as well as Boot Manager if installed.

Resize your primary partition. Do not crowd it too far- leave about 100 MB free space in C:. Create a new logical or primary partition out of the free space. Keep in mind if this new drive will be seen by DOS, your drive letter mapping for ZIP, CD-ROM (all programs/shortcuts/etc. after C http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif will change.


PM 3.0x will work fine, no need to purchase v4. No downloadable upgrade from v3 to v4 last time I checked.


Partition Magic rocks, been a user since Beta version for OS/2 years ago. They were all "on the fly"- w/o data loss.

[Scott Evans]

How the hell did that smiley face get in there? Fat fingered again. S'posed to be C:

[ridefree]

Scott's got the answer. I would leave a lot more than 100meg available on the C drive due to Uncle Bills Software wanting to dump everthing onto drive C. A lot of other programs will default to drive C for data files or swap files not to mention the glut of all time for major surfers: temporary internet files.

As for Version 4. It has one very nice feature that I think was worth the price: an excellent "transfer" program. Once you have added the new partition, you can move programs off of C onto your new D drive and it will remap all of your shortcuts for you.
It has worked perfectly for me so far. Another important new feature is the abiltiy
to backward format a FAT32 partition to FAT16 without trashing your OS or files. As far as the basic partitioning utility, I don't see any real change from version 3.

A tip if you are going to use Version 3. As it comes on floppy, it is fairly slow. Once you have your new partition, you can copy the contents of the floppy to a folder in the new partition and run the program off of the hard drive if you want to change the balance of your partitions. Really fast then.

[Scott Evans]

Copy partition (and data) was in v 2.x and up. The shortcut and link re-mapping program is present in v3.0x as an add-on. I have not used v4, but it had a lot of room for improvements as far as the shortcut and link re-map program (Uninstaller Mover) was concerned.

Partition Magic is money well spent- it is a BIG time and hassle saver, even if you only use it a couple of times.

At one time I had two bootable Win95 partitions (one for testing and benchmarks), OS/2 v4, NT 4.0, and Linux on the same drive. this would not have been possible without PM.