Partitioning a non-empty drive

Question

I have a laptop which has a 465GB HDD. This is paritioned into a 451GB partition and a 15GB recovery partition.

There is currently 80GB of data on this partition. I wish to partition the 451GB into 150GB and 300GB or so. Is this possible, obviously without formatting?

Answer 1

Windows 7 and Vista include a built-in functionality in Disk Management to shrink and expand partitions. No more 3rd party utilities needed!

Go here for a quick guide with images http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

For 3rd party softwares

Use Partition managers like Acronis Partition tools , best i have used

Other Partition tools include: Paragon

• Partition Manager EASEUS Partition
• Master 6.1.1

For a Complete List of Partition Tools along with their OS support, Go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software

Answer 2

You can shrink the existing partition of 451 GB down to 300 GB. Then create a new partition in the free space.

Resizing partitions is possible with e.g. GParted.

Note that you should have a backup of the data, just in case...

Answer 3

Yes. It depends on the filesystems you use, but there are some tools which are capable of resizing partitions. I've got good experiences with gparted, which uses gnu libparted. You should backup your data before. If you don't have a linux live cd, consider using the gparted livecd, which is build to do such things.

REMEMBER: Backup your data!

Answer 4

It depends a lot on your OS. Without knowing your OS, the easiest way would to get Parted Magic, burn that onto a CD, and boot from it.
You then can shrink your 451 GB partition to a 150GB partition and create a new 300GB partition with the remaining space. Click Apply, and reboot (taking out the disc of course).

And as always, there's always the possibility of losing data, so backup even with this nondestructive method.