Missing SATA Drive / Recently Activated

[Kymmy]

He's not mentioned the capacities of the drives.. But yes I personally would do it that way.. D onto new drive, leave E in place and if possible expand C onto the remaining..

Perhaps if barewolf though comes pack with the order of the partitions on the boot drive

[Barewolf]

Thing is that a lot of my programs i am using for Video editing are on the D partition, so I couldnt really move that data to the new hard drive without something going wrong, I guess I could Leave E as it is and Shrink C, But thats not anything ive done before, would have been easier just to merge E with C and use my new drive for all my video editing files.

---------- Post added at 14:38 ---------- Previous post was at 14:37 ----------

Both Drives are 320Gb

C is 70gb
D is 212gb
E is 15gb

---------- Post added at 14:40 ---------- Previous post was at 14:38 ----------

Because of lack of space on C im having to redirect any new installs to D hence im running low on both C and D now, especially when you have HD Quality Video's to upload.

how full is the D?

what you could do is move files across to new drive,delete D partition expand C then assign D to the new drive

[Kymmy]

Originally Posted by Barewolf

C is 70gb
D is 212gb
E is 15gb[COLOR="Silver"]

Doesn;t answer my question

In Disk management when you look at the drive read the partisions from left to write (or grab a screen shot)

[Barewolf]

Originally Posted by Kymmy

Doesn;t answer my question

In Disk management when you look at the drive read the partisions from left to write (or grab a screen shot)

Hows this?

[Barewolf]

Originally Posted by zing

how full is the D?

what you could do is move files across to new drive,delete D partition expand C then assign D to the new drive

But D drive contains a lot of programs I use like Adobe CS3 and other Art / Film making programs, not all of them, it has a lot of games I play on them also.

If i move those directories onto a seperate drive I am worried it will screw up the programs.

All I wanted the New Drive for was mainly storing Hi Def Film, but Im still down to 2gb on my C partition and Im down to 21.7 on the D partition. E is not being used for anything, so I wanted to Split that between D and C just to save me a few headaches.

[Kymmy]

He can't expand his C without external software.. as in Disk Managment you can only expand to the right (hence I asked for the partition order which in his case is EDC)

Even if he removed D (after moving the data onto the 2nd drive) he'd need something like partition magic to expand C onto the rest

---------- Post added at 15:40 ---------- Previous post was at 15:38 ----------

Originally Posted by Barewolf

But D drive contains a lot of programs I use like Adobe CS3 and other Art / Film making programs, not all of them, it has a lot of games I play on them also.

If i move those directories onto a seperate drive I am worried it will screw up the programs.

As long as the drive letter stayed the same after the move (i.e you allocated F to the new drive, copied everything from D to F, removed D then changed the drive letter on F to D) then you would be fine..

god I didnt expect to see it set up like that with D in the middle what a mess

[Barewolf]

Well thats not my fault thats Dell for you.

id reformat and set it up how I want but then you got all them programs needing reinstalling

[Kymmy]

Originally Posted by zing

god I didnt expect to see it set up like that with D in the middle what a mess

Seen it a few times before, hence I asked the question

I have no idea if there's any free software about that'll move/resize a partition (I have a registered copy of PMQ from my old tech days that I always use)

THough there has been a CD posted a few months ago on here with a copy of "spook"..or is it "Spirit"...damn I think it's some ghostly name...

What you could do with that is copy across the boot partition to the new drive extending it to the full capacity (or copy across the C and D) expanding each to the right sizes, then format the old drive and use that as E for your HD content

Ive seen the recovery at the start of the hard drive but not the data drive in the middle and the OS at the end. Also ive worked on hordes of Dells and never come across it. And to top it all off its unusual the OS drive is marked as Logical

The D partition is marked system which is also unusual as its going to cause problems in the end no matter what bare decides to do.

---------- Post added at 16:13 ---------- Previous post was at 16:10 ----------

A solution would be imo to move program files off D defrag it and shrink it. Then I would create a ghost image of C on the new drive.

Boot using the OS disc bare says he has . Delete the C partition and create a new partition using all the space available ( C + space saved off D) then Ghost back to the new partition.

[Kymmy]

Hmmm, never noticed that, it's also the active partition

Yep that will cause major issues

At that point I'd start again onthe new drive, put the old one aside, get the new one fully up and running as HDD0 and partitions how he likes it...

Then bring in the 2nd one, copy across any data he needs to keep and then when he's happy format it and use that as his 2nd drive..

It'll also reduce his partitions to 2 instead of the 3-4 he's currently got

[Barewolf]

Well This has been like this since Dell did it 2 years ago and ive never had to format the drive, seems to work quite well. However......

It may be the only option to use the new drive as the main drive with new partitions and start from scratch with the one thats running now, just seems such a pain to do, as I really didnt want to have to re set everything up just how I Like it, and of course, re installing all the programs will take me days.

Oh well