Repartitioning with Windows XP already installed

But be aware that some think partitions save your data from destruction. If you read these forums, you find that's a falsehood.

Bob

Forget partitioning and add an external usb hard drive,you will need to be sure that your system board supports this.If you can access your BIOS it should be possible to set it to boot from CD/DVD drive.CAUTION DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ACCESS YOUR BIOS IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF CORRECT PROCEDURE!

Regards Eric.

If you can't boot from a CD then you're pretty much sunk. Partition Magic is the only way and it costs 70$.

But there is a free way if you can boot up from CD, and it's called linux. Go look up Knoppix, which is Linux that boots from CD. Download it and burn an image to a CD. Then defrag your hard drive (thuroughly. You just want one big clump of NTFS or FAT, whichever you have). Then turn off your computer and boot up in Knoppix (Make sure it's 4.0.2, otherwise it won't be able to do NTFS). And start up QTParted. It's pretty easy from there.

But... without a CD drive you can boot from, Partition Magic is about your only bet. What's wrong with your CD drive that you can't boot from it?

THE tool because- IT WORKS!

Get PartitionMagic. I too have a system that came with XP Home installed. Using PM I partitioned the disk abd installed Linux to play with. I go back and forth regularly and have never had any problems.

You need a recent version! I had a previoulsy -purchased copy of PM v3 and it didn't recognize the XP partition. I think PM version 8 is current.

It's freeware but BE WARNED.... BACKUP ANY VALUABLE DATA FIRST!!!! ESPECIALLY IF THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU'RE USING A HD PARTITION UTILITY!

Altho this works, it seems ppl have inadvertly deleted partitions and asked how to get back that data when there is no way at that point.

Not quite understanding the situation. Is your system fine now, or have you tried to partion with bad results and now your restore won't work.
If your system won't boot you should be able to delete your current partions then create a new primary partion, use the full size available, make just the one partion. Then your restore disk should work. After you restore I see no reason that Partion Magic will not work to create new logical partions. Just be sure to leave enough room on the Original primary partion when you resize it so that windows will have 25 percent free space. I have repartionioned countless system, including notebooks using partion magic 8 and have never had a problem. To eliminate the restore problem in the future use a disk imaging software such as Acronis True Image or Symantecs Disk Image 7 to Image your system drive and save it to one of the other partions. Also change the default location of your My Documents folder to one of the other partions so that the next time your system dumps, and it will soner or later, you won't lose any data. Words of wisdom for the day. Never have anything on the system drive but the system and the installed programs.

Most often you cannot partition a hard drive that is one big partition in XP, simply because you will damage files needed to operate it. Througout the hard drive and OS, it is configured as one large drive, if you change this, it throws the system out of whack and can destroy your OS to where you need to install it again.
The whole drive is considered operating \running which you cannot change a partition that is in use by the OS. When you install your OS you have to create a smaller primary partition, enough for the OS to operate. Then you can partition the hard drive from disk management since whole drive will not be in use. Most partition softwares will warn of even trying this due to the above mentioned.
Most partition softwares will simply not even attempt it or give you an error message.
Much like my XP, 80 gig, I had to install XP on a 20 gig portion, then partition from there after XP was installed. I could not accomplish this prior. I don't think your restoration cd is not working due to updated version so much as a problem with the update itself.
((However your system has to support booting from external devices or it won't either way.))

Paul

If you don't have Ghost, it comes with Norton SystemWorks which you should have anyway. Take a Ghost image of your hard drive (makes a good backup also). Run the integrity check, and make sure you can boot into Ghost and use the backup; I have to use a floppy to boot to and the CDROM image files to make it work on my system. Then use any partition manager, I used FDISK from a Windows 98 startup floppy, to create your partitions. Ghost is capable of restoring the image to a partition if it's large enough to hold the data, it doesn't have to hold the free space.

-kevinthefixer

Everybody leaves out the AMAZING freeware partition manager that I have NEVER had bad luck with!!

EASEUS Partition Manager can be used IN Windows XP, and it reboots to resize the partition, booting from it's software stored on the HD. You can't get any better than this, trust me!
Good luck!