Partition Your Disk Drive in Vista Without Formatting
January 23, 2009 by Milo Riano
Filed under Computers
I grew tired of using Virtual PC (Windows Server 2003, MOSS/SharePoint 2007, SharePoint Designer, etc.) as my development environment and last night I decided to dual boot one of my laptops which is loaded with Windows Vista Enterprise edition.
I have repeatedly written how I love Virtual Machines but I found development faster when everything I need is installed on my host machines. Also, for the next few months I would be working heavily on Digital Collaboration projects with MOSS as the center of development and every second I can save from moving between VPC and my host machine means a lot.
With this, my problem is to install Windows Server 2003 on a separate partition and given that my laptop only has one partition, I need to find be able to partition my disk without formatting Windows Vista. I know there is Partition Magic, but my first option is to find a free alternative.
With a quick research I found this article from Techrepublic titled “Repartition your hard disk on-the-fly with Windows Vista”. Wow, the more I love my Vista machine if this feature worked perfectly. In an excerpt of the article: As you know, the Disk Management console tool in Windows XP will allow you to create a new partition using any unallocated, or free, space on a hard disk. However, if there is a single partition that takes up the entire hard disk, you can’t use the Disk Management console tool to repartition the hard disk into two or more smaller partitions. If you want to accomplish this task in Windows XP, you will have to invest in a third-party console tool such as PartitionMagic. Of course you can back up the disk, reboot with a DOS startup disk, and then use DOS FDisk command to repartition the disk, but then you’ll have to reformat and reinstall, which is a lot of work.
Fortunately, Windows Vista’s Disk Management console tool will allow you to repartition your existing hard disk any way you want. In other words, it will now allow you to shrink, extend, create, and format partitions without putting your data in jeopardy. Of course, before you perform any of these operations, you should back up, just in case.
I would be following the instructions tonight and hopefully I get my dual-boot up and running in no time. I would update you about the partitioning solution result.
The step by step article is found here.
