By dividing your hard drive into two or more partitions, you can almost have the benefit of two separate smaller drives in your system. This means you can separate the files that make up Windows from the data ones, preserving your valuable documents, images music and videos should the worst happen to Windows. You have to be careful when partitioning. It’s a good idea to have a full system backup before your go ahead.
GParted is a free, non destructive partitioning program and you can get it from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php. It’s an ISO image, which you’ll need to burn to CD using the disc burning program of your choice. You can then boot your computer from this disc and use the program to change your partition set up. You may need to enter the BIOS to enable booting from CD, if your computer doesn’t start from the disc. Just restart the computer pressing [del] repeatedly and then make a change to the boot sequence.
The walkthrough demonstrates how to use GParted to resize your existing partition and create a new one for data and backups. It’s as easy to use as its commercial rivals, but doesn’t cost a thing. It enables you to manage all major file systems, including the two most commonly used in Windows: FAT32 and NTFS. The former was used for Windows 9x and is less efficient and secure than NTFS. Some PC vendors still ship computers running Windows XP on FAT32 drives. You can improve performance and reduce the chances of a crash by converting your FAT32 partition to an NTFS one.
GParted enables you to format and resize both file systems, but you can’t convert between them without destroying your data. However, you can change a FAT32 partition into an NTFS one without damaging its data in Windows XP by using a command line tool. Open the command prompt by choosing Start, Run and typing cmd into the Open bar. Click OK. Now type convert d: /fs:ntfs, where d: is the drive letter of the partition you want to convert. You will need to provide the volume label and agree to dismounting the volume if necessary.
Add a new partition
Change a single partition system into one with two separate virtual drives using GParted
1 Once you’ve burnt the GParted ISO file to a CD and set your computer to boot from the CD drive, restart your PC with the disc in place and press enter at the Boot prompt. You will need to specify the language used, screen resolution and colour depth before the program launches.
2 Select your existing partition and choose Partition, Resize/Move. Click and drag the partition to the new size that you want, bearing in mind that yellow area denotes used space. You can’t make a partition smaller than the data it contains. Click Resize to return to the main screen.
3 Select the unpartitioned area and choose Partition, New. Opt to create an extended partition to include the rest of the disk space. Click Add. Now select this partition, choose Partition, New and opt for an NTFS logical partition to fill this space. Choose Edit, Apply to complete all your operations.
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