I have just acquired a laptop with XP Home pre-installed on a 20 GB hard drive. Never having used XP, I'm trying to familiarise myself with it -- especially the disk management facilities.
Since I hate having one large partition, I wish to partition the hard drive into, say, four partitions of 5GB, but am not sure how best to go about this. Working with other OSes I have always previously partitioned and formatted the drives with fdisk prior to installing the OS myself -- but I don't know what will happen with XP, especially if OEM. There are some CDs with the package, but I'm not sure how best to use these, or if there will be problems with the infamous XP registration which I have heard so much about.
Is there any way of repartitioning the HD without reformatting and reinstalling from scratch (apart from using a 3rd party app such as Partition Magic, which I don't have).
I think you'll *have to* use a third party util for this. Fdisk can't do this. Some free utilities are (got this from TweakNewPC.com) :
Ranish Partition Manager, 165KB, v 2.37.12 (most users), v 2.40 (advanced users), Freeware
This is a popular (re)partitioning utility for MS-DOS, Win3.x, Win9x/Me, Win2K, Linux operating systems that does not destroy your data. It supports drives of up to 7.8 GB.
Options include: Boot manager, New partition creating, Activation of a partition, 31 bootable partitions, Saving and Restoring of the boot sector (MBR), Virus protection.
Partition Resizer, 98KB, v. 1.3.4, Freeware
A program to resize and move partitions without data loss (supports disks up to 2TB of size). It's a small DOS executable, which requires no installation.
DO NOT USE Partition Resizer v.1.3.3, or earlier, to move non-FAT partitions (NTFS, Linux, etc).
Features: Disks up to 2TB (2048GB) of size. Resize partitions in one step. Transparent extended partition resizing. Command line parameters.
A simple Google search ought to get you to the download sites.
Or you could use the trial version of Partition Magic 8.0 at http://www.powerquest.com/products/personal.cfm
Incidentally, when you referred to the "infamous XP registration", I take it you really mean "activation". There is a simple way of avoiding, legitimately, the re-activation process after re-installing XP. (Provided, of course, that there haven't been significant hardware changes since the first activation of XP).
Fred Langa (LangaList) says this :
Don Lett was the first to send in this info. It's not a crack or a malicious way to foil Windows Product Activation (WPA), but rather is a way that legitimate users of XP software can avoid having to reactivate the software after a full install:
The trick is to copy and re-use the c:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl file. It's small--- mine is just 13K long--- so it will easily fit on a floppy. Or, you can copy it to another safe location on your hard drive.
Once that's done, go about your reinstallation task normally.
After you've reinstalled XP, either boot to a DOS floppy or start in XP's Safe Mode/Command Prompt (i.e. hit the F8 key when your system "beeps" during the boot process). Then copy your original wpa.dbl from its safe location back into the c:\windows\system32 folder, and then reboot.
Because nothing on your system has changed--- it's the same BIOS, CPU, RAM, etc., and because you're installing the same copy of XP that was previously installed, the "old" WPA key should be accepted as valid, saving you the hassle of re-Activating the software.
Note that this won't work if you try moving the file to a different machine, so it's not a way to pirate software. But if you want to simply reinstall a valid and already-activated copy of XP onto the same
hardware on which it was originally installed, this may save you from having to re-Activate the new installation.
Shyamal Gupta New York, USA. ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
