Home SQL Server Cloud Computing Windows Server Cisco Exchange Windows 7 Active Directory Virtualization Forums IT Job Board Get Our FREE Newsletter! Search Site Gain access to white The Ultimate Guide to Hard Drive Partitioning papers, special offers and by Daniel Petri - March 11, 2009 the most recent IT tips! Printer Friendly Version Sponsors Email Address Disk partitioning divides the data storage space of a hard disk into separate areas referred to as Sign Up Now! Windows Application 'partitions'. Partitions are usually created when the hard disk is first being prepared for usage. Once a Monitoring Made Easy disk is divided into partitions, directories and files may be stored on them. Because of later changes on Quick Links the computer and operating system, often an administrator or power user will be faced with the need to Knowledge Base resize partitions, create new partitions in the unallocated space, and sometimes even undelete Take the guesswork out of Backup & Storage partitions that were previously removed or deleted. which WMI counters to use Security for apps like Microsoft® Active Directory Active Directory™ and Cisco and Routing Hard disk partitioning tools will allow you to create additional partitions from existing ones by resizing SharePoint™. SolarWinds Windows Networking FREE WMI Monitor makes it Exchange Server the existing partitions and creating empty, un-used space on which you can create new partitions. The easy! Download this FREE Virtualization desktop tool now! Windows Server 2008 most important aspect of such tools is their ability to do this without losing your data that is currently on Windows 7 your existing partitions. Such tools allow you to create and format these new partitions. Windows Vista Free Bandwidth MS SQL Database - NEW! New Articles Monitoring Forums Hard Drive Partitioning: Use Caution! Daniel Petri Sponsored Most tools will let you convert a partition from one file type to another, i.e. from NTFS to FAT/FAT32 or FREE TRIAL Download >> vice versa. Needless to say that in most cases, such a conversion, especially from NTFS to FAT/FAT32 Extend Microsoft SCCM to will cause the files to lose their NTFS permissions (ACLs), and in some cases where EFS was used to manage 3rd party patches encrypt the files, it will actually cause you to lose access to these files. So beware! Popular Articles Repair PST Files Some of these tools may be able to help you recover deleted partitions, and if data on that disk was Monitor Network Bandwidth Forgot the Administrator's un-damaged, actually help you gain access to that data. Some, but not all of the tools may have the in Real-time & Prevent Password? Bottlenecks. Download How to Write ISO Files ability to move existing partitions from one location on the disk to another location, again, without SolarWinds FREE Real-time How to Partition a Hard losing data. NetFlow Analyzer Drive Excel Password Recovery 180-Day FREE Trial Repairing DLL Errors Note: We've tried to make this guide as definitive as possible, there are always changes in the How to Change the Serial in Windows XP software world that we're not aware of. We would gladly accept your feedback, comments and tool Install Windows XP Pro recommendations. Please limit your feedback to freeware utilities. Word Password Recovery Windows Server 2008 R2 Disable UAC in Windows SP1 provides both server Vista Disclaimer: The author of this article cannot be held responsible for any data loss or computer and client virtualization, Install Active Directory on enabled by Hyper-V and Windows 2003 malfunction due to using any of the tools listed in this article. Please carefully read the software Remote Desktop Services Home Network Setup creators’ read-me files and manuals, and always test before using any tool on a computer or hard disk (RDS). How to Setup a VLAN on a Cisco Switch that holds critical information. Remember as well that free products rarely, if ever, provide any kind of end user support other than forum or community support. If you're unsure of what you're doing, or New! FREE VM Console Related Whitepapers need technical support, it's best to go with a paid product. Cost Advantages & Benefits of a Microsoft Private Cloud With SolarWinds FREE VM [PDF] Console, bounce 10 Free Partition Tools troublemaking VMs without logging into VMware vCenter, plus track up/down 1 . Ultimate Boot CD status, snapshot of all your Office 2010 and VMs... and more! Download SharePoint 2010 Service here » The Ultimate Boot CD is a bootable CD containing tools that allow you to: Pack 1 Now Available * ● Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run Office 365 is here; Get diagnostic tools on them. the Trial ● Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy * drive, it is still much much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive. The Springboard Series ● Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Tour Returns Next Month ● Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB * memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version. Forefront Online Protection for Exchange When you boot up from the CD, a text-based menu will be displayed, and you will be able to select the 11.1 Released tool you want to run. The selected tool actually boots off a virtual floppy disk created in memory. * UBCD contains a ton of tools including: CPU Tests, Memory Tests, Peripherals Tools, CPU Information, System Center Virtual System Information, Benchmark Tools, BIOS Tools, Hard Disk Installation Tools, Hard Disk Diagnostic Machine Manager 2008 R2 with SP1 Trial is Ready Tools, Hard Disk Device Management Tools, Hard Disk Wiping Tools, Hard Disk Cloning Tools, Hard Disk Low-Level Editing Tools, Partition Tools, Boot Managers, File Tools, NTFS Tools, Anti-Virus/Malware * Tools, Network Tools, DOS Boot Disks and Linux Boot Disks. Windows Intune Subscriptions Available Now to Manage PCs in the Cloud * System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2 is ready to download * Embed the TechNet Widget on Your Site Get your copy here 2. GParted Live The purpose of GParted is to allow the individual to take a hard disk and change the partition organization therein, while preserving the partition contents. GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging). GParted Live is a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86 machine. It enables you to use all the features of the latest versions of GParted. GParted Live can be installed on CD, USB, PXE server, and Hard Disk then run on an x86 machine. Note: Take care when using GParted on Windows XP/Vista installations. Read here for more information: Update to "resize-windows.txt" - Draft to discuss (Page 1) - Documentation - GParted forum Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista Partition The How-To Geek You can also get GParted on various distributions such as the SystemRescueCD, listed below. Get your copy of GParted here 3. System RescueCD SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system tools (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It is very easy to use: just boot the CDROM. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs). System tools included with SystemRescueCd ● GNU Parted creates, resizes, moves, copies partitions, and filesystems (and more). ● GParted GUI implementation using the GNU Parted library (see previous post). ● Partimage saves / restores partitions to an image file on another partition or to another system. ● FSArchiver flexible tool to save/restore a filesystem to a compressed archive. ● File systems tools (for Linux and Windows filesystems): format, resize, and debug an existing partition of a hard disk ● Ntfs3g: enables read/write access to MS Windows NTFS partitions. ● sfdisk saves / restores partition table (and more). ● Test-disk tool to check and undelete partition, supports reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext2/3 and many others ● Memtest+ to test the memory of your computer (first thing to test when you have a crash or unexpected problems) ● Network tools (Samba, NFS, ping, nslookup, ...) to backup your data across the network Get your copy SystemRescueCD 4. TestDisk TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis.