Repartition the C drive of an HP Probook into C and D

I have a new HP Probook. Its 500 GB harddisk is mainly partitioned into a C drive. I say "mainly" because it has small partitions of one to ten GB for recovery and system tools.

The C drive is more than 450 GB. I would like to partition it into about 120 GB for C and the rest for D but there are non-movable files on the drive that prevent me from doing so. The best I can do is partition into about two equally divided drives.

The DVD that comes with the laptop only install a image which, I think, is the same as what is on the harddisk now. If I use a utility to re-format and partition the drive into two, I doubt the DVD would work.

Anyway to do what I want to do and still be able to install the original softwares? Thanks.

yky said:

The DVD that comes with the laptop only install a image which, I think, is the same as what is on the harddisk now. If I use a utility to re-format and partition the drive into two, I doubt the DVD would work.

Anyway to do what I want to do and still be able to install the original softwares? Thanks.

Is the DVD you refer to designed to restore the laptop to factory specifications---in the same way that the recovery partition would?

If so, I'd assume it's a bootable disc that would not be affected by any partitioning plans you have--it would wipe out any partitions and restore factory partitions.

You should be able to use Partition Wizard to shrink C and make a D partition. It's a free download.

Not sure what you mean by "install the original softwares". If you make a D partition, the installed software would not be affected.

Post a screen shot of Windows Disk Management showing all current partition info if possible.

With HP in order to keep the Recovery and Diagnostics Tools partitions bootable along with the OS System Reserved partition, it requires these being on Primary partitions. But you can only have four Primary partitions before one must be converted to Logical in order to add as many adjacent Logical partitions as you want.

So the solution is to first convert C to Logical using Partition Wizard bootable CD How to set partition as Primary or Logical with Partition Wizard.

Then shrink C as needed also using Partition Wizard to Resize Partition - Video Help.

Now create in the shrink space a Logical partition: Partition Wizard Create Partition - Video Help.

To keep the user folders on C you can either move them as shown in User Folders - Change Default Location or copy them there to add them to the related Library - Include a Folder - Windows 7 Forums.

Be aware if you move the User folders to another partition Win7 backup imaging will want to include it in the image which defeats the purpose of keeping the C partition smaller for the image. So I'd use another imaging app in that case like free Macrium Imaging - Windows 7 Help Forums which offers more flexibility. You can use Windows Backup to keep an incremental back up of the data partition to external or another HD however.