Earlier, I talked about how to resize partition in Windows Vista. This guide is for XP users as XP does not have a inbuilt disk resize option.
Live CD method will work here too. As mentioned in my earlier posts, Live CDs are your best bet. For XP you can download a freeware called Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 Express.
Getting Started with Paragon Partition Manager
Let’s assume you’ve got several partitions on your hard disk. After installing a number of resource-consuming applications and system updates your system partition has started to suffer from the lack of free space. But an adjacent partition has a plenty of redundant space. That’s just enough to make your system partition suffer no more.
To increase size of a system partition by taking unused space from an adjacent partition, please do the following:
1. Click the Resize Partitions item of the Express Launcher.
2. On the Wizard’s Welcome page, click the Next button.
3. Click on your system partition. By doing that, the wizard will automatically select an adjacent partition as well. This partition will later act as a space donor.
If you’ve got more than two partitions on your hard disk and a partition you need to increase is surrounded by other partitions, you’ve got the choice to choose which partition will act as a space donor. Just click on the left partition of the pair, as the right one will be selected automatically.
4. Increase size of the system partition with the slider or manually by entering the required value. Please note, when you change size of one partition the size of the other will be changed as well, thus redistributing the unused space between the partitions.
5. On the next page of the wizard you need to confirm the operation by selecting the appropriate option.
6. That’s basically it. By clicking the Next button the wizard will start modifying your disk layout. If you’ve got to do with the system partition resize, like we do in our case, you will be asked to restart your computer in a special boot-up mode to accomplish the operation. So click the appropriate button to agree.
7. In the Progress window you can see in real-time a detailed report on all actions carried out at the moment.
After completing the operation your computer will be automatically restarted back to Windows where you can see that your system partition is bigger now.
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