HDD Partitions + 64-Bit Windows, is it possible?

Hi Guys,

I currently have a single 160GB Seagate ATA Hard Drive, when I got it in the new PC I bought, it was already partitioned into the following state:

C:\ 21GB
D:\ 129GB

I have installed Windows 7 Ultimate 86x, which takes up just over 10GB space on C:\ Drive, I have a slew of downloaded files that I cannot afford to loose, but have no other way of backing up, is it possible to take free space off the D:\ Partition and put it into the C:\ partition without stuffing anything up, loosing or corrupting files, etc?

I do have a 200GB ATA old hard drive, which I can't seem to boot the PC with, to copy the files I want to keep on that, then format the main drive, somehow taking out the partition all together, and re-installing Windows 7 Ultimate, I was also going to change my version of Windows 7 Ultimate to the 64-Bit version, as my 3.6GHz Intel P4 Processor is 64-Bit enabled, but I am not sure what the system specs that are required to run that version, does the system memory have to also support 64-Bit? My System has the following parts in it.

450Watt PSU
Asus P5ND2 SLI Deluxe Mainboard
Intel P4 Socket 775 3.6GHz Processor (64-Bit, Hyper Threaded)
2x 2GB DDRII Memory Modules (4GB Total)
ATI Radeon HD 3850 PCI-Express 16x Video Card (256MB)
160GB Seagate ATA Hard Drive (Partitioned into C: 29GB, D: 120GB)
SATA Pioneer DVDRW Drive

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kindest Regards,

David

 

Easiest way is to back up your files to DVD especially if you can't afford to lose them, as you stated. I never trust a hard drive when it comes to irreplaceable things like documents, photos etc. Never! I've seen too many sob stories about failed hard drives.

Anyways, your C drive is quite small so if you back everything up from D, delete D and increase C to 50GB, recreate D and away you go. Safest way to go.

You will have no issues running X64 as regards the RAM, it's the CPU that decides if you can run X64 or not, you're good to go.

 

Augiedoggie is correct about being safe.

There should be a way to add this drive temporarily as a secondary drive, format it and copy the files from D: to it. As a extra backup before making any changes to your existing Win7 setup. What have you tried so far? Is any existing data on this old drive OK to erase?


Win 7 does have built in tools for changing partition sizes.

I'm thinking you could go to Control Panel Administrative Tools>Disk Management and shrink drive D: (leaving plenty of extra room--so if you have 50gb free, shrink it by 30gb). Then you should be able to use the unpartitioned space to increase the free room on C:.

 

Personally I would not trust the partition manager in Windows unless you have a full backup of the physical Hard Drive (ghost image etc).

I would download and use GParted, which is a bootable partition manager that is much more stable and usable than the windows boot manager.

You can download it here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

 

I'm not sure windows will let you change anything related to the system partition/c:
at least not in xp. I've used gparted, and also recently used EASUS partition manager in win 7 32bit
(i don't think the free version works with 64 bit windows tho)

 

XP allows you to expand into free space directly to the right as does W7, that's why i said to delete and recreate partition D to increase C's size safely.

 

Thanks guys, backing up data on DVD's and will attempt to shrink d, and make c bigger, let you know how I go..

 

gotcha thanks. :major