xa0s
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I have a 1TB HDD in my HTPC and I want to put a few different OS's on it. I'd like to have a play with a few *nix flavours and may even put a different version of Windows on there.
Is there software available to partition a HDD without wiping what's already on there? I've used about 100gb and whenever I want to partition something it normally requires me to format the entire drive. I'm after a application that will allow me to play about with the drive space on the fly.
I've not got much experience with partitions -- do they show up as another drive once partitioned or what? Say for example, I create 3 partitions with a different OS on each partition. How would I boot into that OS quickly without too much fuss?
I've been told Norton Ghost is pretty decent. Anyone used this program? What's the best version and is it crackable if I download a torrent of it?
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willay
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Partition Magic use to be the one in the day which may still be good, lets you resize/chop on the fly.
Once you start making partitions it will only come up as another drive in Windows if you format it with a familiar filesystem like FAT32 or NTFS.
If you want to put linux on there then make the partition and leave it, boot into the linux installer and it will see the spare partition. then depending on what distribution you have selected it will format the partition in its preferred filesystem.
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willay
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oh and once you have 3 partitions with 3 different operating systems booting into each one is as easy as your bootloader is configured, Windows comes with one, so do pretty much all the linuxes and *BSD.
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xa0s
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So, if I just wanted another partition which comes up as another drive in Windows so I can store all my pictures on it, what would I need to do?
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willay
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use one of them flashy partition programs to split off your current partition into the desired size.
then...if this was Windows XP...
Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Computer Management
Then click Storage, then Disk Management. you'll have an entry like 'disk 0' and you'll see two boxes within that row, one showing your current partition which should be 'NTFS Healthy (System)' and another one which will be marked something else but I cannot remember what, then from there you ca click on the new partition, format, assign a drive letter, sorted.
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xa0s
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Decent. Cheers dude!
Can you remove the partition at a later date and add the space back to your main partition?
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willay
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ummmm not sure, if i'm honest i never fuck around with my partitions, i set them from the start and leave it like that. 
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Andrew
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If you don't wish to partition your drive and wish to play with different OSs then you can use things like VMWare or Virtual PC all of which are free.
GParted is pretty good for Partitioning drives too and freely available as it's Open Source.
Again, rather than using Norton Ghost to image your drive, CloneZilla is another Open Source option.
I know how much willay hates Vista but i'm a pretty big fan along with Ubuntu and Lepard.
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Andrew
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quote:
Originally posted by xa0s
Can you remove the partition at a later date and add the space back to your main partition?
Yes you can. Just make sure you don't fuck up the Master Boot Record or you will need to reinstall this. Just google it for your OS, it's pretty straight forward.
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Neo
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Registered: 20th Feb 07
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PArtition magic will do all that just fine.
As Andrew says dont fuck up your MBR, ex boss did this on his new macbook thinking he was cool and had to rebuild the tables by hand
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pow
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Ermm..
fdisk /mbr?
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Neo
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quote:
Originally posted by pow
Ermm..
fdisk /mbr?
macbook darling
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pow
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now they run on intel though you can book them into a dosish envronment
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Neo
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Registered: 20th Feb 07
Location: Essex
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ah touché
I think his was royally bent over though
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