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Help needed to alter partitions

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Curt:
Yesterday I had to use Vista Recovery, but all seemed to go well; all the documents were still there. However, today I was informed by Vista that I didn't have enough free space for the Move_(from backup drive) _To_ (Vista>C>CURT>Music) operation I was trying to perform. I got confused  because there should be about 850 GB free! So now I have to understand at least a little part of this "Partition" issue.

The recovery changed my C drive from a 500 GB into 3 partitions, 9 GB ("Free"), 157 GB ("C"), and 310 GB ("Free"), and I have no idea what-so-ever how to change it back into one 500 GB drive. In fact, the two 500 GB drives preferably should be read by Vista as one big 1 TB drive!

I tried my way around inside Vista, but have so far found nothing that would offer me to change these partitions. I do have Partition Table Doctor 3.5 [PTDD], (on the backup drive), but when I tried "Rebuild", it had nothing to offer, and I in return have no clue how to operate it. But maybe 'YOU' have? Help sure is needed, please! What should I do?

clickable thumb:
Help needed to alter partitions


Edited:
Or should I welcome this change, and start saving my files onto various partitions??
 :tellme:

f0dder:
OK, what the heck have you been doing? :P

1) did you have a single 1TB partition before, or is it just something you'd like to have?
1a) if you had a 1TB partition, what setup did you use to present the 2x500gig as 1x1tera?
2) what was your partition layout like before the problem?
3) what happened that caused the problem you needed to recover from?

Curt:
f0dder; just the man I was hoping to meet :-)

What the heck is a raid?

2) I was uninstalling Rollback Rx data protection ...

Curt:
oh, editions

No, I had 1 x 500 GB as my C drive, and another 500 GB as my D drive which I never tried to touch, may or may not have been another partition

f0dder:
Oh, don't you love when terminology is ambiguous? :)

The "C" and "D" drives are partitions - you can have multiple partitions on a physical disk drive, or you can have a single partition per drive, and there's all sorts of other things you can do that I won't comment on right now, because it would just confuse.

RAID is a technology that "does stuff with multiple physical disks", and presents them as a single disk. This can be for performance, data redundancy, or both. The two most widely known modes are MIRROR (2x500gig drives would show up as 1x500gig drive, if one drive dies you have the exact same contents on the other drive) and STRIPE (2x500gig drives show up as 1x1000TB drive, you get around 2x read and write performance, but your files are "striped" across the two drives, so if one drive dies you lose everything).

Anyway, you say you had only to partitions (or "drives") before the crash, and now your primary drive is suddenly split into this three-partition mess? Never seen anything like it :-s. But at least your second partition/drive was left intact?

There are tools for moving/resizing partitions, I used to use PartitionMagic in the past... but I'd never use such a tool without doing backups first, as there's a quite real risk of losing data (google should be full of horror storries).

ANYWAY, I believe that with Vista it's possible to at least extend partitions, if not shrink/move, with the built-in diskmgmt.msc tool (you can press start, type diskmgmt.msc in the run bar, and press enter).

I would suggest that you make a "small" (considering your full harddisk size) partition for only Vista + Programs, and keep all your data files, documents, music etc. etc. etc. on separate partitions. This makes it much easier to do a clean re-install without having to back up stuff and such. Iirc you're a software junkie, so you'd probably want to reserve 64 gigabytes or so for vista+programs - do your own measurement of how much you need :)

...
As for how to proceed now, it depends on what kind of resize/move Vista can do itself. I haven't needed to do this myself for many years (always doing clean repartitioning and shuffling data back and forth physical disks), so I don't really know what partition tools are available now, and whether there's any decent free tools.

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