Okay, the laptop I bought a few weeks ago has a fresh install of XP on it, and is actually pretty peppy now and everything seems to work.

The bad news? It's an older SONY Vaio that came with a stack of recovery CD's, so it's got an overlaying program that installs XP Home from 3 CD's. The Harddrive on it is still partitioned into two 10GB partitions. I can't seem to find any way to get this into one partition for my C drive. Reason I need this is simple, after doing SP1, SP2, SP3, and the other updates for MS software, I only have 1.25 GB free in my C partition.

I've tried a few dozen partition programs in the past few hours, but the most I can do is delete the secondary partition, but I cannot resize the first one with "trial" software. I don't want to pay $50 to do something I should be able to do for free.


Any advise?

 

partition magic will do it. you have to buy it though.

this one looks like partition magic and is free.

 

Thanks Super. Looked at it, don't really understand how to use it though. Something about a CD, and an ISO?

I also can't find whether or not this will ruin my XP install. Problem is, if it does, I have to use the software that came with this lappy to reinstall XP, and I think that's when it formats the 2 partitions.

 

From what I can see, they created the whole program to run entirely from the disk, without needing to be booted into windows. So it'd just be a matter of downloading their image file and using a free XP add-on piece of software such as ISO recorder: http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm to burn the image file to the cd. You'd then restart the computer and boot directly from the cd. You may need to change the boot priority in your system bios (should be a certain key to hit during boot, prolly on Sony's site).

As far as ruining your install, i don't think it should so long as your only expanding your volume, but I've never had to do something like this. Can anyone else confirm?

Hope that helps man

 

Hey Redz,

I had a similar problem and got the software to do this, and it worked like a charm. (I installed a 250 GB hard drive, but for some reason, it only appeared as a 150 GB, and the other 100 GB was hidden)

I don't have it on this computer, but I can probably email it to you or upload it to rapidshare or something later. (As I recall, the file size is pretty small)

I don't know how you feel about this sort of thing, but to make it clear...

ARRRRRRrrrrr...

 

Partition Magic has always worked for me on XP (on XP x64 not so much lol).
You should be able to install it as a regular program and run it. You can burn the ISO to a CD or you can emulate a CD drive using something like Daemon Tools. You can find the iso on any torrent site, like mininova.org.

If you want a more legal solution, there is a linux program caled GParted. You can download an ISO for a bootable CD here:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/g...mp;big_mirror=0

It should be straightforward to run and use Gparted once you boot with that CD. You can check their website for documentation: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Neither of these programs shouldn't screw up your windows installation (nor lose any data). But you should always backup your important data before doing stuff like this, you never know what can go wrong!

 

Okay, here is the file:

http://rapidshare.com/files/116070180/fo-pp85.exe.html

It installs and cracks itself... Virus free.

 

iso is an image of a cd redz. If you get stuck give me a call. I've done this hundreds of times with partition magic.

You have to do this outside of windows like sleeper was describing. Did the laptop install at "backup" partition? if so you might run into problems....I'm not sure how it'll act when it can't find it's backup drive. Uninstall any sony installed backup stuff first.

 

Actually, I got it guys and gals! Thanks for the help!

 

what software or softwarez did you end up using?