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Partitioning a Hard Drive in Vista
How do you partition a hard drive in Vista without having to pay for one? Is there free programs? Or can I do it by myself?
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Partitioning an existing volume is almost always DESTRUCTIVE, meaning that everything on your computer right now will be deleted. Making a new partition is like cutting your disk in half. You won't be getting more space, you'll just be able to install more than one operating systems. It won't make your system faster at all. If you're ok with that, I'll walk you through making a partition(for free). You need a cd burner, a blank CD-R or CD-RW, your windows install disk, the install disks of any other operating systems you are going to install, and these instructions printed out. You can't partition without those things, so buy them if you don't have them.
►Download and install InfraRecorder, here:
[Link](Mouse over link to see full location)
►Download the Gparted iso here( gparted-livecd-0.3.4-7.iso):
[Link](Mouse over link to see full location)
►Insert your blank CD-R or CD-RW
►After you've downloaded the gparted iso, open InfraRecorder(the main application, not infrarecorder express). Go to Actions>burn image. Find the gparted iso file you just downloaded in the window that pops up. In the next window, change "write speed" from "maximum" to "1x". This will ensure that the disk gets written properly. Wait for it to finish writing.
►MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR DATA, WE WILL NOW ERASE IT
►Put the gparted disk in the computer and restart it. At startup, it should boot from cd(if not, change the boot order in BIOS). Text will scroll down the screen, most of which you can ignore. There will be 2 instances where it will prompt you for information, simply press enter each time.
►You'll get a nice graphical interface. On the top right is the selection for which hard drive you want to partition. If you only have one hard drive, you don't need to click that. In the center are your current partitions.
►I'll walk you through creating 2 partitions, if you want more it's easy to figure it out.
►Click the one current partition on your drive. Click "delete" in the upper left. Click the (now only) entry of "unallocated space". Click "new partition(in the upper left).
►This is very important. On the FIRST partition of the FIRST drive on your computer(the one labeled C in windows and /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 in gparted), you need to put a cluster preceding it, for the MBR. So on the first partition you create, put 1 in "free space preceding".
►"new size" is in MB and will be the size of the new drive. There are 1024 MB in 1GB.
►Don't modify "free space following", it'll adjust that by itself.
►Change filesystem, on the right, to NTFS if you're going to install windows on that partition, and EXT2, if you're going to install linux on that partition. If you're going to install linux, make sure you make a swap partition that is 3 times your amount of RAM, in addition to your other partitions.
►Right click the new partition, and select "format to..." and then click the type you just selected above(NTFS for windows, EXT2 for linux)
►Click the "unallocated space" after the partition you just created, and make a new partition. Follow the steps above to create another partition. For partitions other than the first, leave "free space proceeding" 0. If you just want 2 partitions, you can leave everything but "filesystem" the way it is. Make sure to format after each partition.
►No changes have been made yet, and you can restart the computer and it'll be the same as it was. After you make these changes, you will need to reinstall windows, so have your disk ready. Make sure your data is backed up!!!
►Click apply(the checkmark). Everything will be saved to the MBR, and your data will be gone(or at least very expensive to recover).
►Click the "off" button in the top left and click ok. The disk will eject. Remove it, put in your windows install disk and click ok. When the computer restarts, you have to reinstall windows. If you're going to install linux, install windows FIRST. If you install linux, then windows, windows will override GRUB, and you'll need to take some extra steps to get back to linux.
Good luck! I'll be glad to help if you have problems with this.☺
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