Hi,
I recently bought a 500GB HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to replace my Wife's
HDD in her Dell WinXP Home Edition laptop.
Years ago I used ATI to create a HDD (120GB) image to an external HDD. I
installed the new 500GB and used ATI and external HDD to install the "image"
to new HDD. Note: Afterwards, I had no trouble booting up the computer.
Now I have a 120GB HDD (original HDD size) with about 380GB unallocated.
About 5 years ago, I did the exact same procedure (above) using a 250GB
HDD and Norton's Partition Magic V8.0 (2004) and it "worked".
I replaced the 250GB with a 500GB HDD. However, Norton's PM (V8.0)
had an issue with this larger HDD.
Can anyone recommend a good partition tool or technique for me to add
a partition for the unallocated space?
I am willing to pay for it.
Thank You in advance, John
With my copy of an older Partition Magic, the problem
is any setup without 63 sector alignments (sizes and offsets).
It's possible ATI restored with 1MB alignment. You
would want to see if that realignment can be corrected
during the placement of the material on the new drive.
(See if there is a "Legacy" versus Vista/Win7/Win8 setting.)
Then, you might get fewer error messages from Partition Magic
working on the disk later. Partition Magic has
not heard of 1MB alignment.
As long as you have an effective backup of the original
material, you can fool around with the free partition
managers.
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
I tried to do something with the Linux GPARTED the
other day, and it actually crashed on me. And from
a relatively recent LiveCD download. It didn't destroy
the partition, but it did leave the virtual and physical
size of the target partition set to different values.
The physical envelope, is the size recorded in the
partition table. The file system "number of clusters"
is the virtual size declaration, and the file system
can be set to a much smaller number of clusters, than
the physical space reserved for it. Someone has
even had that happen using the Windows 7 Disk Management
shrink function - a file system was left with an
internal size, half the size of the envelope recorded
in the partition table.
So even when you think a tool is "trustworthy", it
can bite you. I've read one report of an early version
of the Easeus freebie partition manager, corrupting a
FAT32 partition. Having a backup is handy at a time like this,
no matter what tool you decide to use.
The best part of the Partition Magic I use, is the
fact it stops updating the "progress" on screen,
and you can't tell if it is crashed or what is going
on, until it is finished. You might have to wait a
couple of hours, to find out the real result.
Adding (as opposed to resizing) a partition is easy,
and only requires a visit to Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc).
If you are running out of partitions, correcting that means
adding an Extended partition, which is
a way of storing additional Logical partitions.
Three primaries and an extended, can store three
OSes, plus a slew of logical partitions for data.
Just as an example of there not being a "four partition
limit". More partitions can be placed there. The
additional partitions are blue colored Logical ones.
Here, I still have plenty of room for more of the
blue colored Logical ones to be added.
http://i60.tinypic.com/2egeg76.gif
Paul
