Resizing partitions with Partition Magic

[Terry Pinnell]

I bought Partition Magic 7.0 a year or so ago, and set up 2 partitions
on each of my two identical HDs.

C: 11.7 GB 0.6 free (Main XP Home System)
D: 44.1 GB 28.4 free (Data)

E: 11.7 GB 4.6 free (Old XP Home system for emergency)
F: 44.1 GB 8.5 free (Backups)

My initial judgement was plainly a bit poor, so now I'd like to
resize, increasing C (and probably E for symmetry) and reducing D.

Will I find this straightforward please? Any snags to watch out for?

 

[John]

The functionality you need is there inside PartitionMagic (use the Resize
option), but as the other posters said, PM has been known to fail before
when doing this (I've had it happen to me). Make some backups.

 

[Rod Speed]

funny thing.................

Nope, nothing surprising about it at all.

I have used PM V4 thru V8 for regularly generating/resizing
hard-disk partitions and have NEVER "buggered" up a disk
or lost a partition.

Even you should be able to use groups.google
and find examples of it doing that.

It is absolutely essential to run ScanDisk on all disk
partitions BEFORE playing around with re-sizing partitions.

If its that crucial, Powerquest should have PM do
that before attempting to adjust the partition sizes.

Also using the full surface check in
ScanDisk is highly recommended.
Ditto.

And, if your disk has shown signs of any disk-flakiness
in the past, do not attempt a re-partition. Better go buy
a bigger disk and use PM to copy the partitions to
it, while resizing them at the same time..

The very safest way of doing the actual re-size
exercise is by executing the changes after booting
your PC into Partition Magic with the Partition Magic
rescue floppy disks.... just in case there is any problem
(virus etc) in the XP operating system software.

The very safest way is to have a full image of the entire
physical drive that can be used if the brown stuff hits the fan.

It will be a little slower than using the OS,
since disk-acceleration is not available.

By the way, there is an update to PM 7.01 on the Powerquest
web-site. Download and install it, then create the 2 rescue
floppies using the approprite selection under "Partition Magic
7.0 Tools". The update deals with issues other than re-sizing
FAT partitions, but better be safe than sorry..........

True in spades of a full image of the entire physical
drive that can be used if the brown stuff hits the fan.

 

[Terry Pinnell]

The functionality you need is there inside PartitionMagic (use the Resize
option), but as the other posters said, PM has been known to fail before
when doing this (I've had it happen to me). Make some backups.

Thanks for all the helpful replies. Proceeding with caution!