I need to expand my Windows partition so I assumed that my old faithful, Partition Magic, would do the job. However it appears to be incompatable with Vista.

Does anyone know of another prog which will do the job?

You could try 'gparted live' (it's easily found with Google). This is downloaded and burnt onto a boot CD-ROM. You then boot from that - it sits in memory, leaving the disk free for modifications.

But there is a down-side: it's very powerful and, although straightforward to use, can do a lot of harm is used incorrectly.

You could certainly try it and play around - you have to commit to the actions before anything real happens. It's very good for looking at the partition layout, just like Partition Magic.

HTH,
David

I've used it a few times and never wrecked anything yet Download the .iso and burn it to cd, set your boot order in bios to cd rom first and then restart with it in the drive and follow the instructions.

I used paragon's partition magic on Vista recently and it worked well

http://www.paragon-software.com/

Cheers

Alex

I found a copy of Paragon PM but I can't seem to access my C drive for some reason, even after a reboot.

I'm now waiting for gparted live to download on a very slow torrent.

Ok then, I have had a look at Gparted and it looks really good but it doesn't seem able to merge partitions - just resize or move.
Have I missed something?

A bit more info if it helps - I have a 25Gb Primary (Vista) partition with an adjacent 15Gb Extended partition which I would like to merge, making a single 40Gb one. There is a further 100Gb partition which I use for data storage.

It appears that I can't change the primary partition in any way - all resize or merge functions are greyed out. I can do anything I want to the rest of the partitions .... very frustrating

[Edited on 10-8-07 by RazMan]

How much data have you got on the extended partition? If it's not too much, I'd copy it onto a CD-ROM, then delete that partition and enlarge the existing one to use that space.

Once done, you can copy the data back in.

(but this is guessing, as I know 3/5ths of sod-all about Vista and its curious ways!)

There's about 80Gb of data, music etc so burning that lot onto DVDs will take a while. I do have a 200Gb external drive which I could use so that won't be a problem.
I don't think it is a Vista related problem as gparted uses Linux doesn't it? It sees all the partitions but just refuses to resize or merge the primary one.
tbh I just wanted to avoid having to reinstall Vista as it takes such a long time to reinstall all the progs again.

Merging partitions is a good way to loose all your data.
Having played about with partitions for a long time the only operations I would to an existing bootable windows partition is shrink or expand.

Even then take care windows is much more picky about partitions and the actual hard disk hardware than other OS.