Partition...Hard Drives

[Charl Van Zyl]

Hi.
Does anyone know if its possible to format one part of ur partitioned hardrive.
There is data on my Dive D partitioned drive which i dont want to lose, Reinstaliing is not a option, and coppying it over is not either, it a program that needs to be instlled to run properly.

I want to reinstall windows with out losing this data, is it possible ?

 

[BigHildy53]

There are various programs, such as Paragon Hard Disk Manager, which allow drives to be partitioned in multiple ways without loosing any data.

 

[spyknee]

Go into disk management.
start>windows search type, disk managment>right clicks on boot
What is the boot drive size allocated? How much of that boot drive is used?

ie: you have a 250 GB hard drive. The boot is a 250GB allocation size. Only 125GB of the allocation is used. It is possible that you could shrink that volume to say 150GB, leaveing a little overhead. A right click on your boot drive in disk managment. Shrink..................................125BGB.
Next, you would then create a primary partition with the 100 GB space that is now unallocated space. Right click on unallocated space and create a 50GB vloume and format it. Once formatted, you can then transfer over the files you wanted to save. pics, music, work

So now you have a C:\ and a new ?X:\ volume with your copied files.
Go into mobo bios set cd-rom to boot device and insert OS install disk. When it comes up, all you want to do with the disk is to format the listed C partition. The additional volume should also be there so do not format it. Once the C partition has been formatted, you should be able to install OS to it. After up and running you shoud be able to copy saved files to where ever.
I'm far from an expert but this is what I would try.

Please input system specs.
The numbers above are a generalization.

 

[Charl Van Zyl]

Thanks, on my PC at the moment i have a 500Gig Drive partitioned into 200G of 3.
My OS is installed on CDrive, And my work i dont wantto lose on Drive.
So yor saying when i want to reinstall my OS i can just format the partioned CDrive , And it wont effect my Drive. ?

Thank you i will give this a try, i really hope it works .

 

[spyknee]

I said I was not an expert, double check my advice.

ie: You have 3 volumes on 1 drive. Lets say you use windows Word. You have it installed onto the boot volume and all the files you have created with it, saved on another volume entirely. I think you can reformat the boot volume, re-install OS there, re-install windows Word there and be albe to gain access to the saved "Word files" on the other volume no prob.
But if you have placed the app on a non-boot volume and have worked with and saved the files on that secondary volume. You will not just be able to use that Word installation with the new OS boot volume install. The app will not be connected to the OS properly. You could probably get at the saved files with a proper Word install however.