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#1
Access denied while creating partition
I'm hoping somebody out there can help me -- or, more accurately, help me help my mom! With the death of XP, both I and my mom went out and got ourselves brand new HP desktops, running Win7 Pro 64-bit. They came with the OS installed and ready-to-go (other than a bunch of Windows updates), but we both wanted our hard drives partitioned -- one drive for system stuff and programs, and another for our data/files. I did this on my computer first (which has about twice the disk space, RAM, etc. as my mom's has --although her computer is still very good, too), following the instructions that I found here... How to Partition Your Hard Drive in Windows 7: 12 Steps - wikiHow Everything went smoothly, no problems whatsoever, easy as anything -- and so I thought I'd walk my mom through the process over the phone, too (after having her thoroughly and completely defrag her hard drive). Well, everything seemed to be going smoothly, I suggested that she split her 500 gig hard drive into 80 gigs for her system/program files, and the keep the rest for her data, and she managed to get the appropriate numbers put in the correct spot (as per step #4 at the above link), and then she pressed the "shrink" button... and then something went horribly wrong. An error message popped up from "virtual disk manager", saying that "access is denied". Strangely, now when she looks at the info shown in the Disk Management utility, up at the top where the drives are listed there (black text on a white background), it shows that her C: drive is indeed now ~80 gigs* in size. However, down below that -- in the gray half where the "squares" are showing the drives, her C: drive still shows up as being it's original size of ~500 gigs*, and there's no unallocated partition showing up at all. (* Please note that I'm simplifying the numbers here, and not taking into account two partitions, D: and E:, that HP creates for recovery utilities) I've searched all around the 'net and can't seem to find any solution to this problem, let alone any discussion board where anyone else has encountered something like this -- perhaps this has come up here before, but I can't seem to find it. Can anyone help? I don't know what to do. Now it would appear that her C: drive has indeed shrunk to ~80 gigs, but we can't seem to "see" the unallocated space that should be there for us to create a D: drive from. Any suggestions would be most helpful, and I'm extremely grateful (for my mom's sake) if anyone can help. Thanks so much in advance! :)