gPart-ache!

Hiya from Texas.

I'm helping someone with a partition and we have run aground in choppy waters.

The computer is a Sony Vaio XP Home desktop. For some reason Sony sells these things with the hard drive partitioned. Its a 160 Gb hard drive, but has been partitioned into a 15 Gb c: and the rest of the drive is partitioned into a D: Why would Sony do such a thing? Rhetorical question... nevermind.

The original problem I set out to solve is that the C: is full and they can't install their new printer. Of course if the C: is full they are going to have other problems too eventually.

I ran across this problem once before, and was able to resize the partitions using gParted no problem. Just made the C: bigger and the D: smaller. No biggie.

This time, not so. gParted shrunk the D:, but I still can't grow the C:!?? So now there is like 100 Gb not even allocated and the C: is still full.

Now gParted is not letting me undo my changes to the D: or grow the C: (the sizing option is greyed out)

I was able to get my hands on an older copy of Partition Magic 8.0 but it says error 114 and will not load.

Any other thoughts? Really good partitioning programs? I really didn't want to have to reinstall windows!

Jim

I have backed up, so its not the end of the world, but I would prefer not to have to reinstall everything to free up that C: and conquer the 100 Gb that has gone feral on us.

 

Hello.

What I may suggest is have you tried expanding the drive using the Disk Management in Vista? Also, Have you tried other versions of Partition Magic?

I have also used gParted in the past, really good tool. But never used it much in Win Environments.

Thanks,

 

You could have a crack with Easus Partition Manager? (now called master)

it has served me well in the past
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

 

to Elder_Usr
Kind of hard using a Vista feature on an XP machine.
Have heard of some having success somehow by using a Linux disk.

 

Haha! Sorry about that. And yeah, you may be able to use a live distro, such as Knoppix or even Ubuntu to possibly make those changes needed.

Thanks,

 

Sigh... I have to fess up. I have figured it out and I owe an apology to gParted. This was a BCK error (..you know Between Chair and Keyboard..) gParted was working perfectly. Sorry gParted!

The partition diagram for the D: had a light green box within the dark green box. Evidently all I had done was shrink the light green box (an internal NTFS partition) but overlooked the external dark green box (an EXT partition.)

Thats the reason the C: could not be made bigger - the EXT partition was still the size of the old D:. I just shrunk the EXT partition as well, and the button to increase the C: was no longer greyed out and everything worked out perfectly. Oops silly me =-|

Anyway hopefully this little resolution will help someone else down the road; and thanks to everyone who tried to help.

Thanks,
Jim

PS Elder_Usr: Great signature (..too bad I had to live up to it.. lol wheres my patch!..)

 

Hey jf38081,

Well glad you got a resolution. and I don't know if they make one for Problem's between chairs and keyboards. If they do let me know, I'll definitely be sharing that around

 

Excellent. Glad you got that cleared up.