Partion Magic

this with Partition Magic.
But the first thing it said before commencing the operation was,
This is a bit risky, you should take a backup.
A DVD drive and ghost would be my recomendation otherwise you are in suck it and see mode.

Rather than without a full backup, if he has not already done so, have him move the swap file from C: to F:. This should free a lot of space.

Additionally, I would recommend an external drive and Ghost. Total cost can be ~$200.

Good luck.

Craig Herberg

But honestly without a full data backup and here I do mean full DATA which includes any Data all E-Mail and Address Books entries I just wouldn't take the risk.

While it should work without a problem there are no guarantees and Murphy's Law applies here the more important the data is the greater the likelihood of loosing it is. Really it is a very poor and possibly expensive practice not to perform regular Data Backups as HDD do fail and to recover data off a dead HDD is very expensive.

I would suggest for the sake of speed but not necessarily reliability a USB caddy with an IDE HDD in it and at the very least backup the DATA to this so that if anything goes wrong the important stuff isn't lost. This is what most people fail to understand the actual hardware is worthless in comparison to the data stored on the HDD/s as the hardware can be replaced in a matter of hours but not one byte of data can be recovered if the worst happens and even if it is only a dead HDD involved it will be several K to recover the data off that by a professional data recovery company.

Makes a external HDD look really cheap doesn't it?

Actually to follow best practices there should be at least 3 copies of the data done on a rotating basis with at least 2 of the copies OFF SITE so in a worst case scenario not all is lost and you should only be down for the length of time it takes to replace the hardware that has either died or been destroyed.

Remember just because the thing isn't running doesn't make it safe from Lighting Strikes or burglary.

Col

Backups are a must, and particularly before doing any partitioning work.

Data which is accessed infrequently (or never) should be stored offline. I'd imagine this applies to a large chunk of your data. Data which is important and or accessed frequently should be backed up on a regular basis. DVD rewriters are really cheap now, and with the right software the backup task becomes fairly trivial. I backup around 6GB of data weekly onto DVD-RW and rotate 8 copies.

Looking at things another way, have you considered moving most of the swap file to another drive, moving the documents folders or removing old restore snapshots.

Before going any further, consider how cool you'd be if you lost all your friends data....

This is a tech. problem, in search of a solution.

It properly belongs in "Technical Q&A," not in "Discussions." Please re-post there.

Not only will you be more likely to attract the attention of those seeking to provide answers, but you will also make it easier for those seeking discussions to find such.

Thank you.

Talk about coincidence. I just did this very same thing yesterday. I had a similar problem. I had a c: hard drive that had 3Gig and an F Drive with 20Gig. I used a tool called EZ Gig to back up my 3 Gig Drive to the F Drive. I replaced the 3 gig drive with a 20 Gig new drive and used EZ Gig to restore the image on to the new 20 Gig drive. and Partition Magic 6 to partition the new drive. The whole process took about about 90 minutes. Partition Magic is a good tool and so is EZ Gig. I believe Partition Magic is up to version 7 or 8 now. I bought my version in 2000. I recommend the newer version because I am sure that it has new features that make the process even more friendly. You can back up both drive images to an external hard drive for insurance, but you should not have any problems if all you are doing is resizing a partition.

Welton Davis
WeltonD@juno.com

When did you stop using English as a first language? :)

Are you now in South Africa and that has caused you to start typing in that way? :p

Cpl ]:)

The smallest HDD that I can buy is a 40 GIG Notebook Drive even the 3.5 inch are now up to 80 GIG new from the wholesalers. Maybe there are a few old new stock units out there which just have not been sold yet but even still a 40 GIG 3.5 inch HDD has not been on the price lists for about 2 months now. And the 40 GIG notebook drives are Special Order with 60 being the smallest that are being held in stock.

Maybe it's just the wholesalers who I deal with having good stock rotation and not reordering things that they consider as uneconomical to carry.

But for a good laugh I had to replace a HDD on an computer so I quoted on a 40 GIG drive about a year ago now when they where the smallest available and the guy was insistent that I was trying to rob him blind and insisted that he only needed a 10 GIG unit so I got a price on a special order 10 GIG Seagate for him which I would have been more than happy to sell him as I would have been making more money out of the deal but for some reason when he got the price he wanted the 40 GIG unit. After all what he thought he wanted was 1/4 the size and three times the price so it makes sense doesn't it? :)

Col ]:)

To type as bad as OZ does :D but when I looked last night one question that I attempted to answer a couple of times had two of my answers posted both saying essentially the same thing but in different words. Must have been held up somewhere but it does make life hard when you post something and it doesn't appear to arrive doesn't it? :)

I see you are really taking this OZ fan club seriously though but you'll need to try harder as I could understand what you posted. :p

Col ]:)

Symantec Ghost Enterprise 7.5 corporate deployments of DOS->Win9x->2K + sysprep on FATx/NTFSx have been my livelihood and method of backup for a while.

As backup method, you can't use an image or any other tool to backup a retail XP OS boot partition. You can if you have reseller or Corporate "select" volume license media, but otherwise after restoration on first boot, the OS tries to authenticate and thinks it's being pirated.

There is a convoluted way around this but you are limited to 3 tries, then you have to pay microsoft US50 to 100 for an activation code.

I discovered this when I preplanned to rebuild my system from scratch with SP2. I'd have multistage image backups -
Bare bones OS drivers, patches
+Virus, security, utilities, internet apps
+apps

I was in no hurry as I'd bought 4 new U320 SCSI drives for my P4-2.5 1G RAM and my old OS was on clunky old "new" ATAs. I had time to play around and research. Once, the OS validated after sitting for 18 hours, but I didn't chance it.

My point is: I don't believe you can backup or make a usable image of an XP boot partition (other partitions work fine) without volume licence media and there's my data.

I'd love to know how if you do.

You still must make contingencies. As others have noted drives are cheap. You can buy a cheap drive and build a duplicate system as time permits.

That's the best solution I know because bootable NTFS CDs start booting on CD but redirect to the the hard drive, and I looked at boot.ini file - either if I changed it to CD wouldn't boot or I had to point it to the hard disk. Microsoft Support confirmed and further said an NTFS boot floppy that booted to the floppy, not the hard disk was not possible.

I would like to say thank you to all of you for all of your advice...I have suggested to my friend that he will need to do the back up and this would be the time to invest in a removable HDD, we can then back up all data.
Then we can try the Partition Magic 8, but not untill we have the data backed up. All of your answers were very interesting, and once again thank you.

Well I would like to let you all know that I have now used Partition Magic 8 (after I backed up all the DATA) It worked like a charm, I am very impressed with this tool. Once again thank you for all your advice..

Michael