expand xp partition?

[bookouri]

for some reason I thought that you could expand a partition to take up free/unpartitioned space in XP Pro. Do you still have to use partition magic or something to do that?

thanks

 

[bcastner]

The dispart.exe command permits the expansion of an existing partition. But several cautions. First this is not a particularly friendly command. Second, if the partition is either the boot or system partition, it will not allow it to be expanded. Third, the filestore must be NTFS or datalosss will occur. From the MS KB article on the use of Diskpart:

extend [size=n][noerr]

Use the extend command to cause the current in-focus volume to be extended into contiguous unallocated space. The unallocated space must follow (it must be of higher sector offset than) the in-focus partition. The intended use of this command is to grow an existing basic data partition into newly created space on an extended hardware Raid logical unit number (LUN).

If the partition had been previously formatted with the NTFS file system, the file system is automatically extended to occupy the larger partition, and data loss does not occur. If the partition had been previously formatted with any file system format other than NTFS, the command is unsuccessful and does not change the partition.

Diskpart blocks the extension of only the current system or boot partition.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=300415

For these reasons many users decide to use Partition Magic, or similar tools from Acronis and other companies.

 

[bookouri]

I was afraid it wasnt as simple as I had imagined.

I started to use Partition Magic but the version 8 that i have gave me a bunch of warnings about not working with this version of windows so I backed up to look for another way..

thanks

 

[bcastner]

Try the trial of BootITNG:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

 

[bookouri]

Thanks, Ill give that a try.