To add to what JB posted, a third party utility eg Partition Magic will do
as you desire without having to go through hoops.
PS A fairly large data drive, you will be backing up all this data I trust
"cryocynique" <cryocynique@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:E21719F5-5D94-4B5F-8913-20651380519B@xxxxxx
Quote:
> When does it make since to partition a hard drive then? Only whe you have
> a
> Recovery partition or have two operating systems? I hear what you are
> saying, but academically, if there is an answer to my original question, I
> would still like to know the answer. I tried use defrag.exe to see if
> some
> kind of a disk map would be displayed, but it told me I needed to use an
> administrator command prompt. Any one know how to get that?
>
> Thanks!
> --
> cryocynique
>
>
> "Carey Frisch [MVP]" wrote:
> Quote:
>> Purchase an external hard drive and perform periodic backups to it.
>> It does not make any sense to have data on a separate partition
>> that is on the same hard drive. If you hard drive should fail, you'll
>> lose everything!
>>
>> --
>> Carey Frisch
>> Microsoft MVP
>> Windows Desktop Experience -
>> Windows System & Performance
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> "cryocynique" wrote:
>>
>> I have Vista Home Premium preloaded on a Dell Inspiron 1520 with a 320gb
>> hard
>> drive. I would like to isolate the OS from my data by shrinking the OS
>> partition to 42GB and creating another partition for my data. However,
>> Vista's partitioning utility says the minimum I can shrink the existing
>> partition to is around 176gb. I suspect that even though I have
>> defragged
>> the hard drive, there is some part of the OS that is sitting on the drive
>> out
>> far enough to cause this. I can't verify this because Vista's defrag
>> utility
>> doesn't show you a map of the drive during defrag. Anyone know of a way
>> around this?
>>
>> Thanks!
>> --
>> cryocynique