disk partition

[dmb1]

Hi,

I have a HP Pavilion pc and windows XP and am trying to create some disk partitions from my hard drive but don't seem to be able to do it. I have over 17GB of free space on the drive but when i try and use diskpart to create a partition it says i have no free space - am i missing something really obvious here??

Cheers

 

[CluelessJon]

whats diskpart m8 ?

"Help others get what they want and you will get what you want"

 

[dmb1]

it is something i found in teh help menu which uses command prompt.

do i not need to use this at all then?

 

[bcastner]

I believe what you are seeing is the HP recovery partition, and because of the peculiar way in which it is setup it may appear as empty to Disk Manager but its GUID attributes make it non-partitionable.

See this for clues:

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/personal_computing/support_doc/bph07144.html

 

[dmb1]

in computer management i can see both the recovery partition and the normal hard drive and so i am clicking on the normal hard drive as the help guide says that i should get an option which says create partition but it does not which is why i am using dispart which i am also not having much luck with!!

Does this recovery partition mean that i can't create any more partitions?

 

[bcastner]

dmb1,

Diskpart even scares linney.

You cannot partition the drive if the existing partition fills all available space on the drive.

What you would like to do is to shrink the existing partition and then use the newly freed space to add a new partition.

Neither dispart or Disk Manager will let you do this.

Powerquest Partition Magic, Syquest Partition Manager, and the Acronis Partition utility would allow this, but native XP tools will not.