HD partitioning

The first thing to do there is what you said last being the creation of a set of recovery disks before making any drive changes. If something goes bad at least you can restore things back to factory! The manufacturer's support site should have a page with instructions for this there.

1) For "shrinking" the present C primary down first in order to create a new partition in the vacant drive space created you would need a good 3rd party drive tool. The resize option in the Disk Management is generally troublesome when the OS is loaded on the partition you are trying to resize.

For 2) refer to the first part of reply!

A good drive tool for seeing C primaries shrunk in size without ending up with problems is GParted live for cd. Since you are booted live from either a cd or a usb flash drive with the live image written to it you can simply shrink the primary down so far according to how much is already on the drive.

Even if you decide to use another partitioning program the instructions for GParted explain how resizing partitions works. GPARTED DOCUMENTATION - RESIZING

General documentation starts off at GPARTED DOCUMENTATION - GENERALITIES

If you are brand new at repartitioning drives the first item of concern as well as the recovery disk set would be backing up any important files you want to keep externally or burn a few data dvds to avoid any loss.

I still don't see the point of making a separate partition for your data files......

If you ever have to reinstall Windows, you can just make a new installation ontop of the old one. Setup will just move your old data files to the Windows.old folder.

Bonkey the Backup Monkey. It's free and ez to use.

7 already has two different tools to work with included. For backing up the entire drive to an external HD you would create a system image. Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup[2]=Backup

For simply restoring files and settings following a clean install of 7 to replace a previous one you would use the Windows Easy Transfar with files already backed up on the new partition. Windows Easy Transfer - Transfer To & From Computers[2]=Backup

Your laptop's user manual should point to the full recovery option seen at post for restoring everything bringing it back to factory without the separate disks usually a key combination. That automatically reformats the factory C primary during the restoration process. When lacking an external a second storage/backup partition is usually something to consider especially with a larger capacity drive.

For the latest available(well not quite latest withdrawn for some corrections) release of GParted live for cd you would download the iso image from Browse GParted Files on SourceForge.net

Now the small 94-100mb partition seen at the front of the drive is the boot sector the preinstalled 7 sees there. The D partition is all of the Windows files PLUS! note the word "plus" everything else that gets packed on along with 7 namely the manufacturer's prepackaged softwares.

One thing that would be usefull here however is a look at what you see in the Disk Management tool as far as present partitioning. If you can grab a snip of that with the Start>Accessoires>snipping tool and post it here that would be a help.

With only some 13gb tied up with D you can elect to dump that entirely once the recovery disks are made up or simply leave that present since a 500gb HD has plenty of room to work with.

Nope, not like Acronis.