Hi everyone,All I wanted to do was enlarge my C: partition by 5GB to give XP Home a little more elbow room and I understood that THE tool for the job was PartitionMagic. Not so, or so it now seems.My main drive is a WD Caviar SE16 250GB (WD2500KS) SATAII. There are 2 partitions on this drive: SYSTEM C: (15GB) and PROGRAMS D: The system has been stable for some time and the remaining free space on C: is currently around 3.5GB, although this yo-yos up and down according to the number of preserved restore points and various routine cleaning operations.When I built this PC I felt 15GB was more than enough space for the o/s and its paging file. Sadly, despite my best efforts, there are some installations that will always insist on being installed on and saving data to C: and so, over time, I've seen this free space slowly dwindle. The intention was to enlarge C: by 5GB with a corresponding reduction of D:I did my research and soon discovered that PartitionMagic 7 would not cope with drives larger than 80GB and so I purchased and downloaded its current successor, version 8.05 which will handle drives up to 300GB. Piece of cake, or so I thought.I followed the wizard and the system rebooted to execute the resizing operations. Then 'error 100' appeared and this, I was informed, indicated a bad partition table. I hit any key, as advised, and the system continued to boot uneventfully into Windows and nothing had changed. I ran chkdsk /f and the included PartitionInfo module which returned no errors (!?). Time to get in touch with Support.Support is now conducted via instant messaging using Symantec's own bespoke service and I was soon in contact with one of their 'Analysts'. The problem was described and then the bombshell was dropped, and I quote: "Please note that Symantec do not recommend to perform resize operation on boot or primary partition.Increasing or decreasing the size of your boot or primary partition is not recommended. Please note that if we resize the boot partition then the the partition tables of your boot drive will be damaged. Then it will not boot in the computer. That is the reason Symantec do not recoomend to to perform resize opteration on boot or primary partition. I would suggest you to contact your system vendor to re-install your operating system."Well, I was really taken aback by this revelation and attempted to challenge him on the matter, but got absolutely nowhere. My requests for further clarification were ignored and all I was receiving were repetitions of the above mantra. I asked to be shown where this was stated in the included user manual but, again, no help was forthcoming. In the end, the link was terminated at Symantec's end.Not to be put off, I tried again and this time a different 'Analyst', who clearly knew his stuff, took charge, linked remotely with my PC and after a few minutes decided it could be done and asked whether I was prepared to go ahead. I voiced my concerns and rather disconcertingly, he also confirmed what had already been stated by his colleague: "It can work but we do not recommend" He then suggested trying a different approach: First ensure good backups of C and D, delete the D partition, resize C, reboot, recreate D followed by a restore of D's backup data. Unfortunately there was still no guarantee of success and so I thanked him and decided to go away and think about it.I found this experience very unsettling particularly as I can find no mention of this warning in PartitionMagic's User Manual or the Quick Start Guide. The only possible reference appears to relate to FAT file systems: "Occasionally, resizing a FAT partition displaces the first few files on the partition (such asIO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS if the partition contains an operating system). If you resize a boot partition and then it fails to boot, run SYS.COM from DOS or from the PartitionMagic rescue disks."Now, I am of course wondering what you all think about this? I would be very interested to have your reaction.Cheers,Mike

Mike,I think they're just covering their backs in case things go wrong but that doesn't suggest high levels of confidence in their product does it? :-hmmmTo be honest going through all that work to gain 5Gb on C seems like an awful lot of hassle. I had a 37Gb Raptor partitioned in two until recently. There was very little software on E and I decided to move the remaining software to C, get rid of E and resize C.That worked flawlessly. You could either do the same or perhaps buy another drive, transfer all the data from D to it and then delete D and resize C. That's the least risky option. You also gain having the OS on a separate HD to FS presuming FS is on D currently.Do you really have it partitioned as FAT32? NTFS would be a lot better.Hope that helps.

Hi Ray,Thanks for responding. Yes, what you are suggestion does, of course, make a lot of sense. However, despite what the pundits will say, I do find it very convenient having the o/s on a smaller partition as it makes various housekeeping tasks so much easier...and quicker. Also, it ensures that parts of the the o/s itself do not become fragmented amongst everything else on the drive...at least that's my rationale ;) However, this method does seem to have worked for me now through several builds.The problem with consolidating everything on one drive or, indeed, moving huge blocks of data to a separate drive is the amount of effort involved reinstalling and reconfiguring everything - this would have to be done as the drive references would be wrong. Currently my D: partition contains all the heavyweight installations and the data adds up to 124GB. Everything runs well - dare I say it, even FSX (with the usual caveats) - and you will understand, therefore, my fierce reluctance to rock the boat. If it works don't fix it...LOL!Sorry, perhaps I should have emphasized that all my drives are formatted NTFS and have been since I installed XP all those years ago.Regards,MikeEdit: Also, I should have added that I have compared the performance of XP on my setup with other setups that have used the 'single drive installation route for everything' method and it stacks up pretty well. I do make quite a bit of effort to keep the bloat to a minimum and the partitions are defragged frequently using the excellent PerfectDisk. I have a second physical drive ( E: ) which is used mainly for archiving backups and storing large captured and processed video files from my camcorder.I suppose my main reason for wanting to do this is to accomodate programs like Google Earth and Virtual Earth more comfortably. These install on C: whether you like it or not and the large volumes of cached data also goes on C: as well. My broadband connection is not the fastest so, while I can delete previously cached data (I've identified the files), I would prefer not to as it reduces the loading times quite substantially when you revisit places in the world.

Hi Mike,I understand your desire to keep apps and the OS as separate as possible. So all you have installed on C is the OS plus some software that can't be installed elsewhere?If you have plenty of space on D then there's no reason why PM shouldn't be able to resize things without losing any data.What I suggest you do is firstly reduce D by x Gb depending on how much you need for now and the future. Make sure that completes before doing any other tasks in PM.Then expand C into the space created by shrinking D. If your drive is as well defragmented as you suggest there should be very little movement of files. It will simply expand into the space created.Ultimately on a new system I would recommend a minimum of two hard drives. One for the OS and a separate one for FS. Perhaps a third for your apps that you don't want on C.BTW, PartitionMagic is just one of a suite of apps. It also includes DriveMap which will change entries in the Registry for those moved from one drive to another. You may want to look at that as a possible alternative to reinstalling.

I also had lots of problems with PM 8.0. And then I found out that PM can't be used with external usb drives at all, (it doesn't recognise them properly, or chucks out error warnings about "bad data format" or similar.)As I have 2 external USB HD's (one 300Gb and the other 500Gb)for data backups, I needed something better, and now I use Paragon Partition Manager.Been using it for over six months now, and haven't looked back. It can do everything that PM can do, and a whole lot more.BTW, I've also re-sized my boot partition with it (NFTS), no problems at all.I can't say for sure if it also works as well with FAT32: I haven't used that since Win98SE :-hah, no good reason to use FAT32 these days anyway, NFTS is much better in all respects.RegardsGrahame

Symantec bought PartitionMagic so they could kill it I guess. It has not been updated since ver 8 and a patch and is sadly out of date. I wouldn't use it any more, especially if vista is involved at all.I used PM since their very beginning, and also their multi-boot loader, and it is sad that this has happened.scott s..

Yeah, PartitionMagic was a great software and I loved using it years ago for various applications. It seems anything Symantec touches turns to $h|t

Mike,If you look at the most recent issues (might be November or December)of Personal Computer World or maybe PC Pro magazine you can get Paragon Partition Manager 8.5 free on the cover DVD's. All I had to do was register my copy.I have not used it to change a partiton yet but it appears to work okay on Vista.

Thanks very much everybody! Your feedback has been most helpful.However, I wonder whether we could receive some input from anyone who has managed successfully to accomplish what I would like to do?I have applied for a refund and, so far, have received no response (should I be surprised?). Until I do hear from Symantec I am still entitled to use their software. Rest assured, I am keeping Paragon's Partition Manager in mind.BTW, does anyone know whether this can be accomplished using Acronis True Image Home? I use it all the time for routine backups. I came across this in the help file of version 10:"Changing the Restored Partition Size and Location You can resize and relocate a partition by dragging it or its borders with a mouse or by entering corresponding values into the appropriate fields. Using this feature, you can redistribute the disk space between partitions being restored. In this case, you will have to restore the partition to be reduced first.These changes might be useful if you are to copy your hard disk to a new high-capacity one by creating its image and restoring it to a new disk with larger partitions. This way of cloning is used if it is impossible to connect the second hard disk to the PC."I haven't yet worked out how this works in practice and am considering e-mailing Acronis for guidance. The help file gives no practical examples which would have been helpful.If I understand this correctly (see the bit in italics) I would not be able to restore the content of C: or D: to partitions that have been adjusted in size prior to the restore operation. In other words, I should be able to resize as is after taking the precaution of making a backup. The one thing that worries me, as with PartitionMagic, is that if this fails I am faced with having to restore my partitions outside Windows and Acronis's bootable rescue disk has not yet been tested (other than confirming that it does indeed load) in anger. However, if you read on, the second quoted paragraph of bold text above appears to contradict my interpretation.Cheers!Mike

HiI have resized boot/system drive using both PM and Paragon and done so without problems. I must confess, though, that has been a long time since I've used PM, it was an independant company then.But whatever you do: DON'T TRY THIS WITHOUT A BACKUP!!! And not just any backup, you must be able to run it off a CD or floppy or such.I use Paragon, they include a boot CD, and that has saved my rear end more than once!!!BRGDSSven Sorensen, EKCH

Hi Mike:I have also used PartitionMagic (PM) since its very first version 1.0 years ago when it was a PowerQuest product. As you may know, it has since been purchased by Symantec, and has undergone significant changes only up to a certain point.First of all, it's critically important that nothing be done unless you have complete and current backups. And any repartitioning that is to be done should be done with a machine that has a substantially larger battery backup unit on it if you wish to avoid the inconvenience of having to restore a backup at all (been there, done that, had a power blip destroy a drive during a PM session!)Also, I would not use anything less than a PartitionMagic 8.05, as it can indeed handle drives as large as my 800 GB 4 drive RAID 0; there is a downloadable update for prior 8.x versions, each of which had limits on the drive size they could manage However, as I began using drives larger than 40 GB, I began to experience problems when resizing the primary boot partition in just the scenario that you describe. This process is now very much risky business as the amount of people who even know how to do this at "Symantec India" is declining steadily with each passing day, besides the fact that the outsourcing firms who staff these positions don't want to engage in the training, nor do they wish to allocate the time to these lengthy recovery processes which sometimes become necessary when a repartition goes wrong.The tech support guys at PowerQuest were top-notch; too bad they ended up selling to Symantec because it was an excellent company with excellent products that was definitely up-and-coming in the software world.I have had several resizing scenarios go wrong when trying to add space back to the primary boot partition. I have engaged in multiple lengthy tech-support communications via e-mail with techs submitting PartInfo files to those who actually did know how to fix this at both PowerQuest and Symantec, and its a PITA to deal with. This is complicated by the fact that no one seems to really know authoritatively what the cause of the problem is.One technician who seemed to really know what he was doing suggested that there is some reliance upon Microsoft's own code in the way that PartitionMagic operates, which results in an attribute being incorrectly applied to partitions when any one partition on the drive larger than 68 GB in size, and he suggested making sure that if you use PartitionMagic to resize the primary partition, that one never have any individual boot or logical partition (in the extended partition) at a size larger than 68 GB. I have yet to try this because I don't have the time to allocate testing that, so I have refrained from ever resizing my primary partition, and instead always set up my C: drives with it least 20 or 30 GB for that partition just to play it safe.The fact that you have definitely got your D: partition larger than 68 GB inclines me to believe that you should not even attempt to do this using PartitionMagic. Even if you purposely resized it into several smaller sizes below 68 GB each beforehand, the uncertainty factor with PartitionMagic on drives with a total combined size over 137 GB is still very high when it comes to resizing the primary partition.I used to think it was because I purposely kept my C: drive primary boot partition formatted with FAT 32 as I awaited recovery software's maturation to the point where it could more reliably deal with NTFS drives. Now of course, recovery software such as RT-Tools/R-Studio can handle NTFS safely, and can even reconstruct MY RAID drives without blinking an eye. But it appears that the real problem is that Symantec did not carry further the internal programming required to be totally self-sufficient and not reliant upon older programming techniques or Microsoft's code; to my knowledge Partition Magic has not progressed beyond version 8.05, and I was given a personal disclosure in 2006 from an American Symantec tech support representative who works with a different division (Ghost) indicating that the product will eventually be discontinued.Additionally, I cannot vouch for whether it is still safe to use the Drive Mapper utility with XP, and if it did, I suspect it would slow down drive access as much or more than an LBA drive access BIOS overlay file would.It appears that we must now deal with either the Acronis or the Paragon product line for dynamic management of partitions. Regrettably, I have limited familiarity with those products, and no personal experience using them. If indeed they can resize a boot partition regardless of the size of any of the logical drives in the extended partition, then I would say that's an excellent sign for dependability.I do not know if the Disk Management tools in XP or Vista can do "on-the-fly" drive partition re-sizing on non-dynamic disk volumes; I don't think so.I personally would not object to managing my drives from a DOS mode boot, because I consider it safer, so I don't consider it an essential that such a program operate in the Windows mode. Frankly, when I used PartitionMagic on drives other than the C: drive on which it was installed, I didn't notice a substantially faster mode of operation when managing other drives just because I was in the Windows environment operating under 32-bit file access; I believe PartitionMagic was working at a much lower level and did not benefit from the fact that one was inside Windows. So I was always okay with using the DOS mode utility from bootable diskettes.I think because you are already struggling with drive space issues, that the best solution to your concerns would be to purchase another larger drive, and use a file copy utility to transfer your files (including your OS!) from the source drive in a DOS mode boot over to the target new drive.Personally, I use Maxtor drives, and have always had flawless success using the MaxBlast DOS mode boot CD software which comes with the drive to transfer everything, including the OS and partitioning information with all 32-bit long filenames completely intact from the source drive to the target drive using that utility.Many stores are now beginning to reduce prices on 300 and 500 GB drives because there are SATA II 1 TB (terabyte) drives (estimated street price $340) that should be coming out during the holiday season, and it is now possible to get a SATA II 300 Gigabyte Drive for $80, and a 500 Gigabyte Drive for $100!So, what I would do is "manually" set up the desired partition sizes on a new hard disk drive with the partitioning program of your choice (ex: Acronis, Paragon, or MaxBlast in the manual setup mode), format the drives using NTFS in default 4KB clusters, then use the MaxBlast DOS file copy utility to "manually" transfer files over to each of the target drives partitions. I have done this on many occasions, and can vouch for the speed and accuracy of the MaxBlast software in either the DOS or Windows modes..."MANUALLY"; in case you were wondering, it can actually do this and maintain all 32-bit filenames intact!What you do NOT want to do IMHO, is to allow MaxBlast to AUTOMATICALLY set up your drive, because it always anticipates that one's motherboard "might" have a BIOS limitation for large drive access translation or Logical Block Adressing (LBA), and always loads a BIOS LBA-enabling overlay file into the boot sector of your hard drive which you have to go and remove through a special procedure which is a PITA to deal with beginning with Windows XP because the size of this boot sector has been enlarged with that version of the operating system, and Windows tries to write information into the trailing portions of that boot sector as well.Besides the risk of using older versions of FDISK which may not be able to properly address larger hard drives depending upon which and how many service packs have been installed into the subsystem of Windows XP (and thereby could mangle portions of your hard drive MFT in NTFS!), the old FDISK /MBR command switch doesn't clear all of the bytes required to clean up that part of the drive's MBR information without resorting to using special utilities.Also, by using MaxBlast in the "automatic" mode, everything will transfer over in the existing configuration... still leaving you too crowded on your C: drive. So it is best to attend to these matters manually.Well, as you can see dealing with these matters can sometimes be complex; I believe the best solution to your concerns is to buy a separate hard drive, restructure the partitions in advance, format them, and then manually copy your files back. You would save thereby save yourself the headache of reinstalling Windows and all of your software again. Done properly, you should be able to reboot Windows at that point. If for any reason Windows then fails to boot and present you with a logon prompt, you should then be able to put your Windows installation CD into the drive, and quickly do a repair installation/refresh installation of Windows on top of your existing Windows installation which will restore you to your prior functioning without the loss of a single byte, long filenames intact! ;) PS: Keep your Windows installation CD and installation key number handy! :-roll Hope this helps!:-) GaryGB

Hey guys, I'm overwhelmed with the efforts you are all making to keep me on the straight and narrow! Many, many thanks.GaryGB, what can I say other than the fact that your extremely thorough contribution has been copied and filed safely for future reference. Again, a huge thank you! :)Nothing has happened as yet. I'm still considering all my options carefully. I should say that I have now received a response from Acronis Support:"Acronis True Image is designed for backing up your data, and it cannot resize partitions without loss of data. So we recommend you to use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 that has this functionality." I have considered getting a larger drive. Heck, I have 2 external USB 2.0 500GB Maxtors to which I alternate full system backups using Acronis True Image Home. I did have a One Touch II Maxtor but, at the time, it didn't seem to get along with my internal SATA/SATAII drives so I ditched it in favour of the basic external USB 2.0 Maxtors and have never looked back since. Possibly it had something to do with problems I was facing with large file transfer operations over the SATA interfaces on my MoBo (ASRock 939Dual-SATA2). Driver updates made no difference. No such problems have been apparent with the SATAII interface, so my HD configuration became:WD Caviar SE16 250GB (WD2500KS) SATAII + Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 ATA133 UDMA-6 (320 GB) and both drives have been performing perfectly for many months.The problem I face with copying data from my existing SATAII drive to a larger SATAII drive is the fact that this MoBo only sports one SATAII interface so I can't link the second drive to the system. I could, of course, try one of the SATA interfaces again but, following my previous experiences, I don't trust them to operate reliably.So, Acronis's response is currently steering me towards using their Disk Director Suite 10.0. Anybody here using this software?The reality is that I don't really need to do anything in a hurry as the remaining 3-4GB of free space on C: is more than enough to keep me going for some time yet. I'm one of those folk who takes pride in being able to state that with the regular application of careful housekeeping procedures, reformatting and reinstalling has never been necessary short of a major rebuild of the entire system. Windows continues to perform well, remains stable and FS9/FSX are doing just fine....or at least FS9 is, the usual caveats should of course be applied to FSX.I do agree with everything that has been said about PartitionMagic. It would appear that Symantec are not really serious about continuing to support what was an excellent product while owned by PowerQuest. I know as I have used versions 5-7 successfully in the now dim and distant past. Shame really, and I guess this thread may now have answered the question posed in the subject line.I still have heard nothing about my request for a refund. Could this perhaps be a further indication of how Symantec regard their customers? I do wonder.Cheers!MikeEdit: I've been looking at the reviews and knowledgebase for Disk Director Suite 10.0. and, I have to say, it does look very promising:"Please note that decreasing free space of your system partition will prompt you to reboot the machine to finish the operation. No other operations with resizing require the machine to be rebooted. You can increase free space of a system partition, decrease or increase free space of non-system partitions on the fly."This could prove to be THE solution.

Hi Mike:I use the older version of this add-in card device to expand beyond the controller on my mobo and the RAID controller add-in card to accommodate my other extra drives.http://www.promise.com/product/product_det...?product_id=138At the time, I got 2 of them "free" with some bulk packaged Maxtor drives for building various systems for my office, but they are well worth the purchase. They contain the LBA drive controller routines needed to talk to very large drives in order to overcome mobo onboard BIOS limitations.You might note elsewhere on their website they make PCI 2.x legacy and PCI-Express interface controller cards; many stores carry their products or can otherwise order them.Various Promise Technology products have proven quite reliable for me over the years, and although SIIG is improving, I still find that the SIIGs run slower than the Promise or Maxtor OEM'd line they make; Adaptecs are overpriced IMO, although equally dependable.Certain Belkin OEM controllers made with Silicon Image (SiI) chipsets have proven rather efficient, reliable, and cost effective too.If you are in a pinch, you can run the SATA-II (300 MB/sec) drives on a SATA-I (150 MB/sec) port, and they just run at the slower burst throughput speed, but otherwise unchanged. Once connected back onto an SATA-II port, they resume working at 300 MB/sec. throughput.That might help you set up extra drives in your system. A general rule of thumb is that each drive consumes 25 watts of power... for your planning purposes.Hope this helps further! :-) GaryGB

Hi everyone,Well, after much thought I decided to purchase, download and install Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 (ADDS).1. I ran CHKDSK /r on both my C: and D: partitions and confirmed there were no problems.2. I then Defragged C: and D: using PerfectDisk 8.0 (latest build)3. All relevant background stuff was stopped, including AVG.4. The Resize Wizard of ADDS was run and, 7 minutes later, job done!SYSTEM ( C: ), my primary/active partition, had been enlarged by approx. 5GB (from 15 -> 20+GB) with a corresponding reduction in size of PROGRAMS ( D: ).http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/181456.jpgAll this was achieved without having to leave Windows! I gather a reboot to allow ADDS to work outside Windows would have been required if C: was being downsized. I also notice that the previously unallocated space left by XP during the original partitioning operations at installation has been used. I might do the same on ARCHIVES ( E: ) sometime. No hurry.5. I ran CHKDSK from XP (using the error-checking applet) on C: and D: without checking the boxes and no errors were reported. Are errors ever reported using this method?!6. I then executed what is presumably the same error-checking routine called from a running ADDS. The beauty of running it this way is you get to see and read the summary at the end. D: was free of problems but on C: "Windows found problems with the file system. Run Chkdsk with the /F (fix) to correct these". Hmm! I tried again selecting "Check and fix errors and locate bad sectors". Same story.I then did as advised from the command prompt, which required a reboot to execute, and no errors were reported. However, back in Windows the story was the same when error-checking from ADDS. Very strange.I then tried running CHKDSK with the /R switch, but still no change: No errors were reported until I calling the error-checking routine from ADDS.All seemed fine otherwise and the system was and still is performing normally with no apparent instabilities or problems.I decided to contact Acronis Customer Support and they responded very quickly. 2 reports have been generated by downloading and running their bespoke software and NO problems have been identified.So, currently this remains a bit of a mystery. However, I now feel pretty confident that all is in fact well as no problems have ever been reported when C: is fully checked outside Windows.6. The resized C: and D: partitions have now been successfully defragged again using Perfect Disk and I am a happy bunny. :)Symantec have refunded the purchase price of PartitionMagic.Hope this may prove helpful to others who may be tempted to go this route and resize partitions without reformatting and reinstalling everything.Mike

I've never had a problem with Partition Magic before, till this past Friday....long story short, it forced me to format my C partition and reinstall my OS.I just a bit earlier got everything back in order, including FSX. I'm not sure I have the energy to reinstall everything in FS9.Not sure I want to ever touch Partition Magic again....on the bright side, hopefully the clean reinstall will gain me a quicker/faster experiance in FSX.