I've been trying to partition the HD on my newish Gateway laptop. I believe it's a SATA drive. I've tried three ways but nothing seems to work. I tried partition magic, I tried gtparted on a Knoppix live cd and then I tried the windows CD. Partition magic goes through the motions, but then after the first reboot says there's an error and it aborts itself. GTParted gives a similar error. I think I need a driver on floppy for the windows CD to work. In any case, I was hoping to use a method that won't destroy all my data. Any help? Any suggestions? Thanks
So you are running windows from the drive you want to partition? Or do you want to partition the drive before installing windows?
I have windows on the unpartitioned drive already, but I am prepared to lose it and reinstall later. One other thing I tried, btw, is to install Ubuntu from the liveCD, but it wouldn't let me. Now, I'm pretty sure I partitioned this drive before, so I know it's possible -- but for some reason I can't now. If it makes any difference, at one point a few weeks ago I used my gateway recovery CD to reinstall windows. There had been a hidden partition on the drive then, with recovery info in it. That disappeared in the reinstall process.
Go into the windows cd, delete every partition on the drive, including windows, then when its all showing as on big unpartitions space, highlight it, press C and create a new partition, but it will all only show up as on big amount of unallocated space if its all Primary, if one partition is logical, it will show up as a seperate unpartitioned space.
a lot of people don't like Partition Magic[ot]me included[/ot]Acronis Disk Director is much better (i think), personally i use the bootable CD from Acronis Partition expert 2k3 but it's being superseded by Disk Director [ot]hope this helps[/ot]
i couldn't get it to work, after install[ot]but that was a long time ago, they could have improved it though[/ot]
When I had PartitionMagic, a long time ago, I created the rescue disks. You can do everything with them (well... apart from pulling birds) without having to start your OS. You still enjoy the ease of using a GUI. I love my floppy partitioner!!!! The actions are completed on the spot without having to reboot the computer.... marvellous! Thinking about it - can anyone tell me how I can create a CD which will do this so I do not have to rely on floppies?
On a cd i have i have a full copy of partition magic that can boot up before windows, dunno were to get it from though.
Partition expert comes with the software to burn a CD-r, not sure about disk director[ot]i'll check[/ot] Edit: i was wrong Partition expert is actually part of the disk director suite, and it $10 cheaper, here
I've used Partition Magic in a lot of systems and I've never ran into any trouble with it. I've also used Acronis Disk Director and Paragon Partition Manager without issue. What kind of issues do people have with Partition Magic?
Well, I've tried numerous ways now to partition and still nothing works. Could there be some kind of (soft) switch on the HD that tells it not to let me partition it. I don't think this can be a driver problem, because it doesn't work with XP or linux or even (gasp!) OSX. I've tried The Ultimate Windows Boot CD. Could my hard drive be fried? I can install XP on the one partition that's there and it works fine. I can also put Vista on it (not at the same time, of course.) What's going on here? Help!
