Partitioning after Format and Reinstall of Win98se

[BRVB]

I recently installed a brand-new 40GB drive in my Dell Demension 4100, formatted it, and installed Win98 SE.
At this point I have installed a few, but not many, software programs I had on the system before my original 20GB drive began making strange noises, and Dell so graciously replaced.

I'd like to partition the hard drive, but know little about it. A friend says to do this leaving Win98 in its own partition, programs and data on different ones, etc...OK...I can understand the advantages, here....How do I go about this, after having already installed Win98, and also installing several programs back on the new drive? I have heard of and read imfo on the web-site of "PartitionMagic", but there are too many questions to answer before laying down $70 or so...

Can I do the partitioning now with the programs and OS installed already? Will it work as well?? Can the programs, files, etc be moved to a new partition(s), and if so, does this software do this??
Any other software out there that would be better for doing this?


Any help with this subject would be very appreciated...

Bruce

[Jimstep]

If you want to partition your drive without destroying the contents, you will need a third party program such as Partition Magic. If you don't mind re-installing everything again, you can use the FDISK utility to partition the drive. FDISK will detroy whatever is currently on the drive.

[BipolarBill]

Can I do the partitioning now with the programs and OS installed already? Not unless you use Partition Magic or another 3rd-party partitioning application. There are some freeware utilities, but I don't think that you can partition "on the fly" with them. Maybe someone here has a suggestion. Can the programs, files, etc be moved to a new partition(s) Partition Magic used to do this, but they stopped including the Magic Mover utility. Most disk cleaning programs can, but they do a lousy job of it. Better to copy a folder to a new location and reinstall the application there.

Since Windows is already on C: and you have only installed a few programs, leave them there and install new stuff to another partition. Once you have Partition Magic, you'll wonder how you got along without it. :cool:

[Psycho Logical]

Ranish Partition Manager is designed to create, delete, and resize partitions without losing the data on them. It formats FAT-16 and FAT-32 partitions. It also allows you to copy partitions and clone disks. Freeware.

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10096-100-914828.html