Firstly, can I crave the forum's indulgence? I am asking a long question on behalf of my daughter, who is pretty competent with computers, having changed operating systems successfully, for example. But she is having trouble with PARTITIONS. Now, pretty much the only thing i know about partitions is that lots of people die. Below is the text she prepared for me when I offered to ask on here. I'd be inordinately grateful if anyone could help!
I have a nasty mess of partitions taking up most of my computer's hard disk, including an enormous, mostly empty, recovery partition that came with the computer. I've always just ignored them before, but now I really want to install some video games and need a big chunk of disk space. I've been trying to work out how to do it (having never tried to do anything with partitions before), but it seems to be more complicated than I thought, can anyone please help?
To be exact this is what I've got:
1) "WinRE", whatever that is, 2 GB.
2) Windows Vista and old files and programs 125 GB, of which 35 GB is free.
3) Recovery partition which came with the computer 60 GB, of which at least 50 GB is free.
4) Logical sub-partition 1: Linux operating system and current files and programs 56 GB, of which 5 GB is free.
Logical sub-partition 2: Linux's swap file 4 GB.
(I'm aware of the thing about there being up to four "primary" partitions and then additional "logical" sub-partitions inside the last primary partition.)
I've got a program called GPartEd on a bootable CD based on Linux, so I was going to use that.
Deleting 3 (and possibly shrinking 2) and then expanding 4 into the empty space seemed the obvious course, but it wouldn't let me do that, and I've been tol;d that this can't be done because it would be expanding a partition to the
left (adding to the
beginning of a partition, in other words).
So my next thought was to delete 3 and expand 2 into it, and put my games in the empty space on 2. (I've checked on the games' forums and installing them in a different drive from your operating system doesn't seem to be a problem, so it doesn't much matter which partition they end up in so long as there's enough room.) That would be expanding a partition to the
right, so surely that ought to work?
But when I asked about this on a Linux forum, somebody said that as 2 and 3 were Windows-format partitions I shouldn't edit them with GPartEd but use Windows to readjust the partitions - which I have no idea how to do, and I thought it was impossible to edit an operating system partition while the operating system is actually running, anyway. GPartEd doesn't say anything about not editing Windows-format partitions, anyway, so can that be true? And he said repeatedly that it would be easier just to reformat the disk and reinstall everything. Well, to me at least that would be a very long and hard job indeed, and I shudder to think what could make THAT the easier option. Also I'd lose Windows as I haven't got the disk for that.
Is it as bad as he makes it sound, or do you think it could be done? I do have a complete disk image backup (of all the partitions), if the worst comes to the worst. If you do think it would be safer to use Windows rather than GPartEd to do the tinkering, can you tell me exactly what buttons to press in what order?
Thank you!
Peter