what is a cheap but good repartition program for vista?

and i need top repartitiion

For a long time I considered GParted a pretty safe utility, but I used it once to resize a NTFS partition and it caused chkdsk to have a fit with the drive. I have never lost any data with GParted yet, but I would never consider repartitioning a trivial exercise. I would still make sure to backup data just in case.

If you don't need a non-destructive partitioning program, you can't beat trusty old fdisk. Of course there's also the disk management thing built into Vista that should get the job done, so long as you aren't trying to wipe all partitions off of your boot drive.

For the most part though, all partitioning programs are the same. You've got your destructive partitioners a la fdisk, and your non-destructive ones like Partition Magic. The non-destructive ones of course are not guaranteed. I've had it happen to me once (fortunately on a brand new system, first time it had ever been turned on) where they screwed up mid-process and I lost everything. So, the important lesson to learn from this, is always, Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a backup. The other moral of the story, is that there's really no such thing as top tier paritioning programs like there are for some other programs.

partition. I deleted the partition thinking it would automaticly go into the main one but now I can't find the space that made up the other partition anywhere.

You need to "extend" the "main" partition using the unallocated space using whatever tool you used to delete the partition.

John

I also formated the main drive to get all my unneeded files off.

A lot of unnecessary work, forcing you to reinstall all software and restoring your files form backup, and it defeats the purpose of looking for partitioning software, but what's done is done. Hope it all works out for you.

John

and i couldnt find another way. alas it didnt work either.

You must "extend" or "enlarge" the partition using the free/unallocated space, which is easy to do with the free application GParted. Vista's Disk Management (go Control Panel->System and Maintenance->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management) can't always get the job done, and taking drastic actions such as reformatting the main partition only add to the workload.

John

To extend a basic volume using a command line

Open a command prompt and type diskpart.

At the DISKPART prompt, type list volume. Make note of the basic volume you want to extend.

At the DISKPART prompt, type select volume <volumenumber>. This selects the basic volume volumenumber that you want to extend into contiguous, empty space on the same disk.

At the DISKPART prompt, type extend [size=<size>]. This extends the selected volume by size megabytes (MB).

So I wrote: Diskpart in the run field, typed list volume, the base volume was 1. At the diskpart prompt, i typed select volum <volume number> which is either <1> or <Volume1> Then I typed extend [size=<size>] (im thinking the first size was the current drive capacity which is 465GB so in mb (465000=<35000>]

But it ends up saying the arguments specified for this command are not
valid. Please Help Ireally want to get that lost data back.

It extracts into a folder (it extracts the same files as were in the other one) I click extract on that one and it does the same.

The Command prompt seems to me to be the easiest way.

...doesn't always work - as I discovered recently. Partition Magic, alas, does not run on Vista, and browsing the Symantec site recently, I noticed that it's not even listed as a product anymore.

I just bought Acronis Disk Director, which is every bit as good.