Hard Drive Partition/Disk Management

[Jason]

I have an HP pc which came with a partition already made on
the C: drive for making backup cds. After making my
backups, I deleted the partition, which now leaves me with
4GB of "free space." I followed the XP instrustions to use
diskpart.exe to "extend" my c: to reclaim that 4GB, but it
just tells me it's unable to do it. It says to make sure my
c: is valid for extending. Any ideas on how to get that 4GB
back to my HD? Thanks

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You can not use the default XP utiltites to "extend" a XP partition. You
may need a third party utility like Symantec's Partition Magic (Yes it is
now owned by Symantec!!)

Y.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Jason.

The diskpart /extend function is very powerful - and very dangerous in the
wrong hands. Also, there are a LOT of gotchas! One of them just gotcha,
I'm afraid. :>(

Have a good look in the Help and Support file; search for extend. Note
especially the line that says, "You cannot extend the current system or boot
partitions." Often, Drive C: is both the system partition and the boot
volume. That's one of the gotchas; there are others.

I've not worked with an HP PC, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean when
you say that it "came with a partition already made on the C: drive". C:
does not refer to an entire hard disk, of course, but only to a partition on
the disk. How did you delete the partition? Did you use Disk Management?
You should be able to use Disk Management again to create a new partition in
that space, assign a drive letter, and format it. This would not add it to
an existing partition (Drive C:?), but would make the space usable. (Of
course, all this is likely to void any HP warranty, but I suppose you knew
that.)

There are ways to work around the "can't extend the system partition"
problem, but they are not straightforward. For example, you could remove
that HD and mount it into another WinXP computer as a secondary drive, then
boot that computer and use diskpart to extend the partition, which would not
be the system partition at that time.

RC

 

[Mac]

USE FDISK

 

[JT]

e-mail me at (e-mail address removed) but replace nowhere.com with comcast.net
and I'll hook you up.