I rescently installed xp on a 250 gb hdd and installed all my programs
and changed my settings. Problem is I now want to partition my hard
drive so that I can place xp on a partition and all my programs on
another, so that I can reformat the windows on the one partition and
still have all my files, programs, and settings.
Nope, although people frequently think that if they reinstall Windows, they
can keep their programs if they are in a second partition, it can't be done.
All installed programs (except for a very occasional tiny one) have many
entries referring to them in the registry and elsewhere in Windows. If you
reinstall Windows, all those entries will be lost, and a program saved in
another partition won't work.
You can save data that way, but putting programs on another partition for
that reason is useless.
If you want to have two partitions unfortunately, no version of Windows or
DOS has ever had the ability to change the partition structure of a drive
without losing everything on it. To do so requires the use of a third-party
program. Partition Magic is the best-known such program, but there are
shareware/freeware alternatives. One such program is BootIt Next Generation.
It's shareware, but comes with a free 30-day trial, so you should be able to
do what you want within that 30 days. I haven't used it myself (because I've
never needed to use *any* such program), but it comes highly recommended by
several other MVPs here.
One additional point: whenever I see someone who wants to separate his data
in a different partition from the one Windows is in for this reason, I
suspect that means that he has no backup and he thinks that his data is safe
in that second partition. That's completely wrong, and it's not a very good
reason for keeping the data in a second partition. It is always possible
that a hard drive crash, user error, nearby lightning strike, virus attack,
even theft of the computer, can cause the loss of everything on your drive.
As has often been said, it's not a matter of whether you will have such a
problem, but when. The appropriate way to address your concerns is by
instituting a program of regular backup, not by changing the drive's
partition structure.
My view is that most people's partitioning scheme should be based on their
backup scheme. If, for example, you backup by creating a clone or image on
the entire drive, then a single partition might be best. If, on the other
hand, you backup only your data, then the backup process is facilitated by
having all data in a separate partition.
