Favorite Partitioning Tool

Breadfan

What tool do you guys use to repartition your existing drives? I used to use Partition Magic back in the Windows 98 SE days but haven't used it since.

I am asking because I am about to set a dual-boot between XP and 7 and I don't have the wiggle room I would like. I have plenty of room on my logical drives (E, F, G) and want to move some of it over to my C drive to make room for the dual boot.

Any ideas? I didn't want to use any trial software like Acronis since I am not sure how long I will be using the dual boot and the funds are low so buying expensive software isnt option either

Thanks,

Breadfan

paintb4707

Hate to say it but Acronis Disk Director worked great for me. I use the enterprise version at work but the full version of home is only $50

dynamik

paintb4707 wrote: »

Hate to say it but Acronis Disk Director worked great for me. I use the enterprise version at work but the full version of home is only $50

Why does it pain you to give some love to Acronis?

That's what I use too.

paintb4707

dynamik wrote: »

Why does it pain you to give some love to Acronis?

That's what I use too.

Because I've been having nothing but problems with True Image Enterprise and their support team is outsourced, email-based, and completely clueless.

RTmarc

dynamik wrote: »

That's what I use too.

Same here.

tiersten

I've used GParted before with no problems. As per usual, backup your data first.

Breadfan

Thanks guys.

I am going to download the 15-day trial when I get home from work. I only need to resize the C partition anyway to accommodate both XP and 7RC1 dual-boot files and I will be golden. I was tired of running them in a VM.

My only other problem is I wanted to test the Windows 7 x64 on my real machine (and not in a vm) and of course you cant have a 32/64-bit dual-boot scenario.

Thanks again for the tips and hopefully it all will be good.

paintb4707

Breadfan wrote: »

Thanks guys.

I am going to download the 15-day trial when I get home from work. I only need to resize the C partition anyway to accommodate both XP and 7RC1 dual-boot files and I will be golden. I was tired of running them in a VM.

My only other problem is I wanted to test the Windows 7 x64 on my real machine (and not in a vm) and of course you cant have a 32/64-bit dual-boot scenario.

Thanks again for the tips and hopefully it all will be good.

If you're talking about Disk Director I don't think the trial lets you apply any changes. It just shows you the features it has.

tiersten

Breadfan wrote: »

My only other problem is I wanted to test the Windows 7 x64 on my real machine (and not in a vm) and of course you cant have a 32/64-bit dual-boot scenario.

Dual booting 32 bit and 64 bit should work.

Forsaken_GA

parted

qwertyiop

Gparted all the way.
It's never given me any problems

wd40

tiersten wrote: »

Dual booting 32 bit and 64 bit should work.

Exactly.

on my current machine I have:
Win Vista 32
Windows XP 32
Windows 7 64
and ubuntu 64

Having 2 HDD's "one 80 GB + one 320 GB" helped.

you may need to use the boot manager to get the option to boot to windows XP.

---

I never used any "paid for" partition tools .. if I will need to backup my files to use them I think it would be better just to backup and format the machine to get exactly what you need.

L0gicB0mb508

Gparted here for me as well. I really like Acronis products as well.

qwertyiop

i like acronis but i also like that gparted is free and easy to use

Alif_Sadida_Ekin

+1 for Gparted as well. It's free, fast, and easy to use. What more could you ask for?

Breadfan

Well thanks for the replies guys. I found out when I got home (and I saw the post by Paintb too late) that the trial doesn't let you make changes.

What I did was do a Custom Install to my G:\ drive which holds misc stuff and my virtual machines for VMWare Workstation

It put the Windows 7 x64 install in it's own folder and has (for the most part) worked like a charm). The only real issues I have had is that my copy of Zone Alarm won't work on the 64-bit platform and I have had some instances where Windows wouldn't come out of Sleep mode correctly. Other than that, it has been unreal...and better than I expected. It's touch to gauge it when working on virtual hardware, etc. because I could not use Aero Glass, etc. with VM's stuff.

And so far not being able to put the 32-bit with the 64 bit, I think it gave me that error cause I was testing it inside VMWare and it's a limitation of that so I don't what I was thinking Thanks for setting me straight. I am glad I went with the 64-bit.

vCole

dynamik wrote: »

That's what I use too.

Same here.

joey74055

Acronis and Partition Magic.