Extending A Partition without third part

A full backup of your hard disk is strongly recommended prior changing the partition size (even with a 3d-party utility, e.g. Ranish Partition Manager, PowerQuest Partition Magic, etc.)

Even world-wide known hardware/software specialists reportedin their famous books or articles, that at least once their partition management software failed, and only backup saved their data.

So, backup is a must!
The cheapest and fastest backup device today is another harddrive.

I use the embedded Windows backup feature to make a backup on a spare harddrive (actually, just some empty space on another machine's harddrive was enough).
Then I repartition and reformat my initial harddrive the way I desire, and restore the content of my partition(s) from the backup.

As for 3d-party utilities, they might create additional problems, especially on disks with multiple boot.
But I am very happy with Norton Ghost, and I also use it to create an image of my partition(s) on a spare harddrivebefore re-partitioning my harddrives. Then I restore my partition(s) from Ghost image.

Even just simple Windows copy back and force worked flawlessly for me on Windows 2000 Advanced Server and XP (but this is not recommended way of backup, and there are articles explaining why).

You cannot resize a partition on a basic disk, and you cannot resize a volume on a dynamic disk that has been converted from a basic disk. You can't resize the system volume anyway.

I think that you will have to use some kind of 3rd party software. I would use Norton Ghost. Create an image of the drive, and then burn it to CD. Then with the use of a boot disk go in and fdisk - delete the partition and create a new one using the entire disk, don't forget to set it as active. Then format the drive and then ghost the image over to it using a boot disk with CD ROM support.

Hope this helps

We are talking about a single IDE HDD for Win2k.

The best way to repartition and reformat the drive for NTFS is by using another working
Win2K machine. Just connect your HDD to it, run GHOST, and do the rest. From reliability point of view it is more recommended then format by booting from the Win2K Installation CD.

Do not mess around with old-fashion obsolete Win9x diskettes! Use Win2K own system tools.

For a Server there’s only one right option: format directly to NTFS.
When formatting to NTFS without messing around with Win95 diskettes you ensure that you get security d e f a u l t on your NTFS partition(s).

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