I reformatted my laptop and deleted a partition that I once created and no longer wanted.
Now how to I add the unallocated space back to my hard drive ?

I googled and didn't find anything. Is there a way to do this w/o any buying any programs?

6/6/2007 2:41:33 AM

... create a partition? :-/

6/6/2007 2:56:07 AM

Download a linux live CD with gparted that supports NTFS. like http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

6/6/2007 3:02:20 AM

you mean to recreate the main partition or increase the size of your main partition to include the recently deleted partition?

6/6/2007 3:16:50 AM

this scares me. this is like eating food, you get it in you mouth, chew it all up, and then don't know to swallow it.

just put the windows cd in, when it goes to install make a partition and make it as large as possible. Quick format it as well.

Viola!

6/6/2007 8:01:06 AM

then voila you nuke the other partitions too.. what a great suggestion

[Edited on June 6, 2007 at 9:00 AM. Reason : it "scares" me you you could be this shortsighted]

6/6/2007 8:59:02 AM

I think what you're going for is to resize and add the space to your current partition. rather than add an additional one. A Linux live CD should be able to do this with Parted, but if you want a similar solution iin Windows, I have a copy of Partition Magic that you might be able to "borrow".

6/6/2007 10:26:39 AM

DO NOT USE Parted, gParted, or qtParted to resize an NTFS 5 partition. I have tried this many times and it has always fucked one thing or another up. Sometimes it's fixable, sometimes it isn't. (If your disk is a dynamic disk these tools will probably not even be able to tell what the partitions are on your disk, let alone edit them without fucking them up.)

If your hard disk is configured as a dynamic disk in Windows, then the disk management console can resize the partition. If you don't know what a dynamic disk is, then it's probably not and I would recommend using partition magic.

For future reference (if you're the kind of person that uses warez), get Hiren's Boot CD. It has partitioning, data recovery, virus, spyware, and defragmentation tools. It comes in handy frequently.

6/6/2007 10:49:10 AM

I always use Parition Magic to do things like this. See if you can find a copy of that or maybe Hiren's Boot CD (which has PM on it).

As long as it's not Vista. PM and Vista hate each other.

[Edited on June 6, 2007 at 6:06 PM. Reason : Vista]

6/6/2007 6:05:40 PM

knoppix + qtparted = t3h winz

I've resized and/or created NTFS partitions multiple times with qtparted, granted that it was with like knoppix 4 or whatever version was on that

6/6/2007 6:07:39 PM

Last time I used qtParted it fucked my meta data . Took like 2 hours for chkdsk to repair.

6/6/2007 11:30:05 PM

Quote :

"then voila you nuke the other partitions too.. what a great suggestion"

well if she already reformatted her laptop, then re-nuking won't hurt a thing...

6/7/2007 12:16:58 AM

I've used gparted numerous times to resize partition (it didn't have to move any data though) without problems.

If this person is adding a partition, it should work painlessly.

6/7/2007 1:32:21 AM

Quote :

"then voila you nuke the other partitions too.. "

nope. you can only use unallocated space to make the partition with the windows cd. thanks for playing!

6/7/2007 7:29:47 AM

that is not true, in the least, but I haven't logged over 1000 windows installs, so what do I know.

[Edited on June 7, 2007 at 8:31 AM. Reason : ]

6/7/2007 8:31:36 AM

you obviously don't know enough to find a real job if installing Windows is one of your primary responsibilities

6/7/2007 9:08:34 AM

Quote :

"just put the windows cd in, when it goes to install make a partition and make it as large as possible. Quick format it as well. Viola!"

6/8/2007 3:08:26 PM