Changing partition size, adding a third partition

I just bought a new Acer Promise computer. It's loaded with Vista and has a 640G hard disk, which has two partitions. I am not familiar with dealing with partitions. I would like to have the OS and associated programs on a smaller partition, i.e. 80G, and two other partitions for data and such. How do I do this? The OS is on the hard drive (no CD copy) so I don't want to mess up - help!
Marie

 

The easiest way to do this is with a disk management software like Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director. Both of those products will allow you to repartition disks that have data in them already.

If you don't have access to either of those, a great free alternative is GParted. Gparted is an open source partition editor that has a GUI Front end similar to big popular commercial apps, but is 100% free, and also has some really great diagnostic utilities included.

You can check out GParted here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net

I dug up a tutorial for you here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-gparted-to-resize-your-windows-vista-partition/

Cheers
bigd

 

Thanks for the info and the link to the tutorial for using GParted. Unfortunately, the tutorial cautions that a Windows Vista disk is required, or else one will not be able to reboot. My computer came with a Windows image on the hard disk, so ...

I was wondering if this can be done from Vista's computer management?

 

I believe it can be done using Vista's Disk Management utility. Here's a good reference: How to shrink and extend NTFS partitions in Windows Vista

 

Jeesors... I guess its another reason to hate windows Vista.
I can say that I've never used Gparted in Vista because I avoid Vista like the plague. That article I initially referenced is a couple of years old, so I dont know if that would still be an issue.

You might want to do a little googling "Gparted + Vista" or something to that effect to see if its still a problem. I'm stuck with dialup internet for the weekend or I would do a little digging myself....

good luck.