Unable to partition drive

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I'm wanting to partition my main hard drive for various reasons and I found I
am unable to. I've been through the how to's and still no luck. The main
problem is where it says to click on unallcated space and click new partion,
I have no unallocated space. I've done this before but I ened up deleteing
the partition and can't remember what I did. Any and all help will be greatly
apprecaited.
 
The only way to create a new partition in Windows XP is to create it in
unallocated space. If you have no unallocated space you either make
unallocated space by deleting an existing partition, or you use a
third-party program to resize your existing partition(s). Look at Norton
Partition Magic.
 
If you have no 'unallocated' space then XP is taking up 'all' of your hard
drive. To get some unallocated space you will ned to shrink your current XP
partition and the only way you are going to be able to do that is if you use
a third party partitioning application such as Norton partition Magic.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org

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scarredlife said:
I'm wanting to partition my main hard drive for various reasons and I
found I am unable to. I've been through the how to's and still no
luck. The main problem is where it says to click on unallcated space
and click new partion, I have no unallocated space. I've done this
before but I ened up deleteing the partition and can't remember what
I did. Any and all help will be greatly apprecaited.
Click to expand...


The Windows instructions for doing this are terrible and nearly useless. It
tells you to click on "unallocated space," assuming quite foolishly that you
have any unallocated space.

In truth, almost nobody has any unallocated space, and that's why the
instructions are useless. Having unallocated space on your drive is like
buying a four-bedroom house, and closing and locking one of the bedrooms,
still empty, as soon as you get it. Like the unused bedroom, unallocated
space is unusable space.

By the way, a word on the terminolgy. Your drive already *is* partitioned.
To partition a drive is to create one or more drives on it, and no drive can
be used until it has at least one partition on it. If the single partition
you probably have were smaller than the total size of the drive (for
example, a 160GB drive with only a single 100GB partition on it) then you
would have unallocated space. But as you can readily see that would just
waste part of your drive (60GB, in my example), and that's why almost nobody
has any iunallocated space.

So what you presumably want to do is not "partition" your drive, but
*repartition* it, this time creating multiple partitions. Unfortunately, no
version of Windows or DOS has ever had the ability to change the partition
structure of a drive without losing all the data 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.
 
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