I bought a new laptop and it has Windows 7 Home Premium on it. It comes with a 320 GB HDD and it has a hidden recovery disk on that hard drive. I am pretty happy with the idea of it but when it comes to the partition then I have some questions.
1 - ] I want to do partition on my 320 GB Hard Drive and create C Drive 160 GB and D Drive 160 GB.
2 - ] I do NOT want to loose hidden recovery part on this 320 GB Hard Drive while I am doing this.So I can save my computer with it if I need it later on.
Just don't touch the hidden partition. You can shrink your current partition to half it's size and then create a new partition from the newly unallocated space.
Sorry for my little knowledge on this subject but how I can shrink current partition to half it's size ? What kind of application do I need to do that ? Is it risky or easy to follow the steps with some kind of software ? Is there any kind of tutorial link that I can follow and do this job ?
Sorry for the stupid questions. I just want to make sure and loose this recovery part...
First step is to make a set of Recovery DVDs, unless you have one of those manufacturers that think nothing bad will ever happen to the hard drive. With that you will not be up a creek w/o paddle if anything happens to the Recovery partition.
Second is to make a Windows 7 Repair disk (Start - All Programs - Maintenance - Create a System Repair disc). With that you will be able to make certain repairs (such as repairing the boot manager) when/if you can't boot into Windows.
You can try to use Disk Management in Windows 7 to shrink the partition. Often Windows won't shrink as much as we want because of an "immovable file." With 32-bit I like to use EASEUS Partition Master for tasks like this. EASEUS doesn't work (at least the last time I checked) with 64-bit, so I have used the bootable GParted.
There's no doubt that partitioning is one of the riskiest things we do deliberately to our computers. So, make sure your data is backed up and make sure you don''t damage your Recovery option(s). On the other hand I think what you want to do, using the tools I mentioned, is fairly safe--there's little chance that you will make a mistake.
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