Vista partition question.

Hello. Here is what I am looking to do. My current PC has a 60GB IDE drive that contains
Windows XP and all my program installs, and a 250GB Sata hard drive that contains all my
music, videos, porn and other stuff. The 60GB is going to remain inside that computer but the
250GB Sata drive will be my one and only hard drive for my next PC.

The 250GB drive has a 16GB partition for my music and the rest (230ish gb) is for everything
else. My question is, do I make the new partition for Vista (probably 50GB) using Windows XP
before I remove the hard drive from my old PC, or can I install the hard drive as is into the new
system and tell Vista to make a partition for itself? I would like the data on the 250GB drive to
remain intact of course. I want to leave the music partition at 16GB and decrease the 230GB
partition to 180GB to make room for the Vista OS partition.

bump

Originally Posted by mentok1982

My question is, do I make the new partition for Vista (probably 50GB) using Windows XP
before I remove the hard drive from my old PC, or can I install the hard drive as is into the new
system and tell Vista to make a partition for itself?

Yes, you do. Or use some other tool.

Originally Posted by drizzt81

Yes, you do. Or use some other tool.

What does that mean? I asked an or question. This, or that? A yes answer does not tell me which course of action to pursue.

You are going to have to resize the 230GB partition using some third party application. Partition Magic (windows), and Parted/gparted/qtparted (linux) are the only two options that come to mind. Although, even though parted is supposed to be able to decrease the size of NTFS partitions (I think), it isn't always able to. Microsoft has also added NTFS resizing capability to Vista, but it can only increase the size of a partition. (not that it matters to you right now)

Anywho, after you have decreased the size of the existing partition you can make the Vista partition however you want. Personally, I would create the new partition during the Vista install, but thats just me.

Originally Posted by mentok1982

What does that mean? I asked an or question. This, or that? A yes answer does not tell me which course of action to pursue.

sorry I was not clear:

Originally Posted by mentok1982

My question is, do I make the new partition for Vista (probably 50GB) using Windows XP
before I remove the hard drive from my old PC

yes, you can do this, but you will lose the data on that partition if you use WinXP's built-in partitioning tool (diskpart). You may want to consider Partition Magic (pay-for software) or GParted's live CD, which I heard can resize NTFS partitions in a non-destructive manner.

Originally Posted by mentok1982

, or can I install the hard drive as is into the new
system and tell Vista to make a partition for itself?

Again, this is a valid way of moving the HDD to the new machine, but I would think that the partitioning process would be destructive.

You could, of course, just keep the partitions that you have on the drive intact and install Vista on an already existing partition.

Is it just me, or is there an echo in here?

Thanks to both of you. I believe I have the disk that came with my Seagate 250GB SATA drive
that will allow me to resize the partition. I will do that on the Windows XP machine and then
install the drive into the new rig and install Vista on the drive.

Originally Posted by drizzt81

GParted's live CD, which I heard can resize NTFS partitions in a non-destructive manner.

Just to verify this for others reading , yes, GParted can safely work with NTFS, I use it exclusively, and it works very, very well.

Originally Posted by digital_exhaust

Just to verify this for others reading , yes, GParted can safely work with NTFS, I use it exclusively, and it works very, very well.

Yes, I use GParted a lot, it's just nice an convenient. I've never had it fail on me (which is more than I can say for Partition Magic), but sometimes it simply doesn't give be an option to decrease the size of an NTFS partition.

Originally Posted by mindstormsguy

sometimes it simply doesn't give be an option to decrease the size of an NTFS partition.

Really? When, and I'm being serious when I ask because I have never seen this happen. Are there any consistant specific conditions that you remember about the instances when you saw this happen? I would like to know what they are, assuming they weren't just random failures.

Originally Posted by digital_exhaust

Really? When, and I'm being serious when I ask because I have never seen this happen. Are there any consistant specific conditions that you remember about the instances when you saw this happen? I would like to know what they are, assuming they weren't just random failures.

Most likely when there's data at the end of the volume. But I've never use it before so that's just a guess.

It's amazing that no one ever mentions Acronis Disk Director (which is updated for all the latest hardware support and current) but everyone keeps mentioning Partition Magic (which is old and hasn't been updated in over 2 years and is effectively a dead and unsupported product unless Norton/Symantec whips out a new version sometime soon and honest I just don't see that happening).

GParted is nice, but Disk Director works just fine as well and it's a "Windows/DOS" class product for those that can't quite get the hang of GParted which I've had issues with myself in the past, just as one person hinted they'd had issues with Partition Magic.

Just my $.02...

ps
Also, Disk Director (and True Image, another Acronis product) both offer the option for disk-to-disk copying in case you're moving a current install to a new hard drive, like a "drive copy" style utility almost like the ones most hard drive manufacturers include on a floppy or as a download with their products.

Originally Posted by bbz_Ghost

GParted is nice, but Disk Director works just fine as well and it's a "Windows/DOS" class product for those that can't quite get the hang of GParted

Fair enough.
I personally have zero experience with Disk Director.
It is free, correct?
Now you've got my curiousity going, and I think I will take a look.

Originally Posted by digital_exhaust

Really? When, and I'm being serious when I ask because I have never seen this happen. Are there any consistant specific conditions that you remember about the instances when you saw this happen? I would like to know what they are, assuming they weren't just random failures.

Well yes, if I remember correctly the partition was pretty full, more than 80%. The data was probably pretty fragmented too...GParted probably just didn't want to mess around with how many puny pieces of data probably would have had to been shoved into puny gaps in data earlier on the partition. My friend who uses GParted on a regular basis (he works at a small computer shop repairing computers) couldn't believe it until I showed him, but it just isn't there. I still like gparted, its the first program to turn to. I just mentioned this because it was an interesting quirk.

Originally Posted by mindstormsguy

if I remember correctly the partition was pretty full, more than 80%. The data was probably pretty fragmented too

Thanks for the answer.
That makes sense, and I can see why GParted wouldn't work in that situation.

Originally Posted by digital_exhaust

Thanks for the answer.
That makes sense, and I can see why GParted wouldn't work in that situation.

Yeah, but just for the record Partition Magic did work. I guess it's just not as afraid of getting its hands dirty

Originally Posted by mindstormsguy

Yeah, but just for the record Partition Magic did work. I guess it's just not as afraid of getting its hands dirty

It's more likely that Powerquest had bought the rights to use NTFS information from MS. They knew how the filesystem works. By knowing that they could make Partition Magic more capable than solutions that have to rely on information obtained in other ways (not a bad thing, just didn't know how else to put it).