Distributing unallocated space to existing partitions?

[spark-e]

I have a 250 GB sata HD.

When installing WinXP Pro the other week (and having neglected

to read up on formatting Sata drives):rolleyes: I did not press the F6 key

and so the drive was partitioned like a normal drive. All the

available space was not seen by XP.

When the installation was complete I installed all my software,

documents, etc. and went to work.

A few weeks later I went into Administative Tools -->Computer

Management --> Disk Management and noticed that I had the

five partitions I made which gave me 25.60 GB each and another

segment of Unallocated Space of 105.77 GB.

I would like to distribute this unallocated space among the other

partitions. Is this possible in Disk Management or do I need to

back up my work and just reinstall WinXP and hit the F6 key?

Let me know.

[Paul Komski]

With Disk Management you can only allocate it to a new partition. If you want to resize any existing partitions you need a utility like BiNG (in my sig) or GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php) (free on a live CD) or Partition Magic (not free).

Even though all these can non-destructively resize partitions it is always wise to backup any vital data on removable media before using any partitioning utilities.

BTW this was nothing to do with F6 drivers since some of the disk was seen. This is more like a 48bit LBA related problem (http://www.48bitlba.com/)whereby only 128GiB (137GB) can be seen at the time of partitioning.

[rond36]

I agree with Paul, if Win XP setup found the drive and wrote to it you don't need to use the F6 option to install SATA drivers. If Win XP is on C: and you don't have anything on the other four partitions you can delete the four empty partitions and create four 55GB partitions.

[spark-e]

Thanx 4 the advice.

But the next time I get a new SATA Drive bigger than 100 GB and I wanna do a fresh install of winXP. How do you suggest I divide my partitions?

[Paul Komski]

The Radified Guide (http://partition.radified.com/) is worth a read but the 48bit LBA problem (linked-to earlier) is a different one and affects SATA and PATA drives alike.