Resizing Windows Partitions
I have been working on getting my home desktop ready to dual boot Windows XP and FreeBSD 6.1. I have been working on pushing all the data on the Windows partition to the front of the drive (not optimized, I know) so that I could resize the partition. I ran into a couple of snags that I easily worked around with a few helpful resources and tools.
If you have ever defragged your drive in Windows XP you will see a nice chunk of green files at the end of your partition. These are your paging file and your hibernation data. According to the built-in defrag, these can’t be moved with the built-in utility… But they can be removed. This article simply states to turn off virtual memory (your paging file) and disable hibernation, reboot, and they’re gone. No issues after the reboot and my machine actually ran pretty smoothly without the virtual memory.
I then needed to move the rest of the data from the rear of the partition to the front… A useful utility for repositioning the data was the 30-day free trial of PerfectDisk 8.0. This utility moved every file and program from the rear of the drive and repositioned it towards the front with as little gaps in data as possible. I was impressed that this utility could make the move on the fly. My licensed version of Diskeeper 9.0 only does space optimization if it is set to run continuously. Not efficient or timely enough for me. I needed it done like, right then!
Now for the fun part. How many times have you downloaded an entire ISO of a Linux Live CD just so you can use qtparted to repartition the drive? I have many times. Then I run around with the Live CD and boot an entire Linux system up every time I want to repartition a drive. Last night, I did something different.
I downloaded the GParted Live CD last night. This is Gnome’s version of qtparted for repartitioning drives. I popped the CD in my Windows box, rebooted, and, after answering a few questions about drivers I wanted to load at boot, was analyzing my “C” drive in GParted. This Live CD does one thing and does it well. When the Gnome desktop opened up I was presented with GParted. I did my resizing (had to let it run over night… from 37.2GB to 26.8GB) and rebooted and everything was good. Windows came up like nothing ever happened.
So, give any of these utilities a try or recommend some you have used with success. If I had to pick an MVP of the tools I used last night it would have to be GParted. It’s nothing new but it was a new approach to downloading a 600+ MB ISO. The GParted ISO is like ~30MB so it was a real quick process all the way around. Anyway, it was fun to use a new utility for something productive!
Until next time…