Re-Partitioning Hard drive

[Dougie]

I have a 320 gb sata dard drive that I've been using for about a year. There are three partitions C, D and E. C and E are about 150 gb eack and D about 20 gb. Due to (my music) collection growing now to 80 gb, looking back I wish I had of made C partition much larger and D partition smaller.

My question is, short of re-formatting and re-installing XP is there a program available to change / move my partitions on the fly so to speak without dumping everything and starting over? Or is it even safe to move the C partition?

Any advise would be appreciated :) Thanks.
Dougie

[Salem]

There are tools like partition magic (and others - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software ) which should do the job.

> and D about 20 gb. Due to (my music) collection growing now to 80 gb
Even if you absorb the whole of D into C, you're only extending your collection space by 25%. How long will that last?

If you've got all the original install disks (and downloaded all the latest drivers for your machine and burnt them to CD), then spend the money you might spend on a s/w licence you're only going to use once or twice, on the biggest HD you can afford (you'll probably double the space on what you have now).

Plus your system will benefit from being a nice clean install with no accumulated crud.
Plus your old disk is handy for backups, or experiments with other operating systems, or just generally as a big data disk for all your collection.

[vineet957]

Magic Partition tools are good tools . I prefer you go for this thread as well.

Be careful about what OS CD you have. Windows XP can't repair boot partitions over 127GB. Imagine the poor soul that expanded a partition over that and needed to do what would have been a small repair?

[Dougie]

Thank you all for your responses.

I already have an external hard drive for backup exactly like my internal one, it's even partioned the same.

I would actually like to use about half of the space I have on my E partition and use that extra space for my C drive. That would give me an extra 70 plus gb of space. That would do me until the end of this year when I will be building a new computer. At that time I will probably go for one of the tb hard drives.

I will take a look at some of the programs mentioned on the link provided on one of your posts ie: Partition Magic before I decide what I'm going to do.

Dougie