Partitioning Hard Drive with Win 7

[Randal1800]

I am building Rob's SuperPC. I chose to install two 1Tb Caviar HDs. After loading Win 7 I realized that I wanted to partition the first HD into 500 Gb partitions each. Currently, I have a 100Gb "reserved" portion created by Win 7 and 900 Gb partition. I tried to do this with Win 7, but it talks about shrinking or extending your partitions, but it says I can only shrink a 468 Gb partition. Not sure this is correct??

Am I heading in the right direction or is this incorrect??

[The Wise Monkey]

While the built-in Windows tools are usually good enough, sometimes you need something a little more advanced. Try downloading and running the GParted Live CD to resize the partition:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

[Randal1800]

I will try that program, Thanks.

Will it automatically assign partition letters, c:, d:, etc. or do I have a choice?

For the second HD I don't want to partition it. However, when I installed Win 7 I can see the drive, but it did not assign a letter to it. Why is that? How do I assign a letter to it?

[The Wise Monkey]

You will probably need to format the other drive before you can use it, and it should automatically get assigned a drive letter.

You can format the partitions using the software I suggested, and you can assign different drive letters by using the Windows built-in Disk Management tool. To access this, open the Start Menu, right click "Computer" and select Manage. There should be an option for the disk management tool on the left hand side of the screen that appears, and you can use this to make changes to partitions etc.

[Randal1800]

Wise Monkey, I tried to use the Win 7 Disk Manager to shrink the C: drive to 300 Gb (of 1000Gb), but it would not let me reduce the size to less than 474 Gb (half the size of the useable HD).

I'm not sure I have the background to use the program you suggested. Some of my questions/problems are these:

I can't tell which of partitioning program flavors you suggested to use. Do I use the hard drive version?

It says it is for Linex and I'm using Win 7. Will it work for Win 7?

Does this work with a 64 bit system? One other program I tried only worked with 32 bit systems.

I don't know what a grub boot loader is and I don't know if I have a FAT partition.

I would hate to come this far and screw it up.

[The Wise Monkey]

OK, fair enough - it may be a bit too technical.

Using the Windows disk management software, try shrinking the partition as small as it will go, and see if you can then shrink it further after this process has completed.

[Randal1800]

Wise Monkey, one other question:

After I shrink the partition, does the new partition (D have to be formated or will it be useable as is?

[The Wise Monkey]

It should be usable straight away, but you may need to do a quick format - use NTFS, as this is the default Windows file system.

[Randal1800]

Wise Monkey, all went well enough.

Partitioning the HD by shrinking the C: drive worked, but it would not let me go smaller than 469 Gb or half the available space. As you suggested I tried to shrink it again and it said there was no available space. I defragged the partition thinking that it could not go smaller becuase the data was spread out. Sadly it did not work. I may have to by a program to partition or just live with it the way it is.

Thanks for your help.

[The Wise Monkey]

Just been doing some more research into this, and the reason you cannot shrink the partition by more than 50% is that there are some immovable files that are stored at the "end" of the partition.

You can try removing these temporarily - they are such things as the page file, system restore files etc., but it may not be worth the effort; it may just be easier to reformat and start again, even though that is a real pain.