Disk Management/ Partition ?

[gaijin]

I recently installed a 100 gig harddrive in my laptop. I cloned my old 40 gig drive into it via ghost. My old 40 gig drive is now a spare backup, not plugged into my computer.

Now, on my new 100g, my (C) drive shows a capacity of 33 gigs and there remains 59 gigs of unallocated space. Would allocating that empty space to my (C) drive speed up my PC? And if so, how do I do it?

I think I only have one partition on my drive. (as my Computer Management Window only shows one partition, as you can see.) Yet when I boot up, I am given an option to choose XP or 2000. (huh?) I never even had 2000.




Can anyone help me?

[fonixmunkee]

Allocating the spare disc space for your C: drive won't speed up or slow down your computer; it probably won't have any effect. The only way it could is if you allocated the space and expanded your page file (for your memory).

If you clone a 40gb drive onto a 100gb, then Ghost just leaves the rest of the disc alone--it doesn't expand the drive out across the remaining space.

As far as the Windows 2000 thing at boot, I have no idea what that could be. The only thing I can think of is that Ghost might of left a copy of a mini-OS install on the drive somewhere that Ghost boots into to run the clone program. If you want to get rid of that, you can change that by right-clicking your My Computer icon, and selecting "Properties," then click the "Advanced" tab and select the "Settings" button next to "Startup and Recovery." You'll be able to go in here and modify that boot-up menu.

If you need a partition manager to expand that remaining space, you can get a free one from Ranish: http://www.ranish.com/part/

Paragon also does a free version of their Partition Manager, you just have to dig around for it and request a free license key.

[RShea]

Only speed up you can gain is to set up a small area for the computer OS swap file. It can be moved to a separate partition on the computer and out of the existing partition. The speed improvement is very minimal but usually only because this temporary swap area is all contiguous and not fragmented in and amongst other data on the main partition.

There are cloning tools out there that will take and move the data partition from the old size and use more of the new hard disk drive- ie their would be a single large partition of something approaching the full 100 gig of the new hard disk drive when you do the cloning. Acronis software True Image does this for one.

Otherwise just partition the balance of the drive as another drive letter and use it to place data on it. IT will become another drive letter.

As for the menu when you boot up, asking for Win 2000 or XP Pro- that most likely was something that happened in the transfer. There is a boot.ini file that contains a listing of the partitions on the drive and option to do a multiple OS boot. You can easily go and edit this file and get rid of that if you have no intention of doing the multiple OS boot (ie example of running Linux or Vista too on the same computer.)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022

AS mentioned above there are 3rd party utils that will expand the existing partition too if you do not want to go back and redo the clone with the settings to expand the partition to take up more room. (It depends on which Ghost version too that you used as to if it could do this.) Partition Magic is probably the best one out there (usually costs money for their license) and others do this too.

[fonixmunkee]

I did some digging and found some links so you can get Paragon Partition Manager for free.

Download Paragon Partition Manager 2005 from here:
ftp://pm2005:paragon05@ftp.vnudownlo...05_esd_eng.exe

...and then register for a free license key here (must have a valid email address):
http://kb.paragon-software.com/parag...jsp?opid=12353

I don't remember why Paragon did this, but it works great. I think their aim was to have people use the 2005 version and then people would want to purchase the upgrade. Obviously because it's legacy software, Paragon won't offer any support for it unless you upgrade.

Hopefully that works out for you.

[tromano]

Might be a good idea to double check your backup before making any changes here. Any of these changes could potentially hose your system. Just saying.

[gaijin]

cheers for the help guys. I'll probably just turn the unallocated space into a second partition. Sounds like the easiest, safest, most logical thing to do in my situation.

cheers again...