Please suggest a free, reliable partitioning software.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-07-30 09:42am

I need to do the following.

1. Create a small partition and set it active.
2. Put DOS on the partition. Boot from this partition.

Before you ask, no there is no alternative is the short answer.

The long answer is that I have a bare-bones laptop with no cd drive and no floppy drive. I have to reinstall my operating system and want to do a clean wipe of the hard drive, but I don't know how to do it without a floppy drive. There's no way to boot off the network, or to change the boot order. The expensive solution is to buy a USB CD-ROM drive, but I do not want to do this (I am on a budget). Therefore, the only choice is to create a partition, set it active, and boot DOS from it.

So, if I fuck this up, I will have to spend $100 on a USB CD-ROM drive which may or may not be bootable by my laptop's bios. So I need this to be fuck-up proof. I've been looking for no-nonsense partitioning software, but they all either seem to be scams or cost a ton of money. If anyone has a good freeware partioning software, I'm all ears.

If none exist, I guess I'll have to buy one, so suggestions for paid software will be under consideration. Fucking up is out of the question. I have to get it right the first time, or my laptop will not be bootable and I'll have to send in the entire laptop to HP or buy a USB cdrom drive (which may not work, meaning my laptop is dead).

Brian

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-07-30 10:01am

More details -- I checked the BIOS, and you can't change the boot device. I bought this laptop thinking it would be a good idea for it to be bare bones, but without a secondary boot device that means if I fuck up the partitioning, I am fucked. I have done live partitioning before, but for every time I have done it I remember a time I have fucked up and had to format the whole system. Now, if I fuck up the first time, the system won't be bootable! So the partitioning software really needs to be no-nonsense newbie friendly and idiot proof (to a degree, I won't go around deleting partitions randomly), and launched from Windows XP.

<edit>Partition Magic seems to be what I want, but it costs a ton of money in USD no less. I am willing to go command prompt, but only if it runs in Windows XP and does all the technical stuff for me.</edit>

Brian

Tiger Ace · Post by **Tiger Ace** » 2005-07-30 05:12pm

There should be a free version of Partition Magic 8 floating around.

Its very good and I reccomend it.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2005-07-30 05:38pm

You can't resize partitions with the basic Windows tools. In order to do that you must use a third-party program.

Also, if you don't have a CD-ROM drive, how are you going to reinstall the OS?

If you screwed up, though, you could instead buy an adaptor so that you could connect the laptop hard drive to your desktop computer; they're fairly cheap.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-07-30 08:44pm

Uraniun235 wrote:You can't resize partitions with the basic Windows tools. In order to do that you must use a third-party program.

Also, if you don't have a CD-ROM drive, how are you going to reinstall the OS?

I was thinking of putting the whole OS cdrom on a separate partition. Or maybe get network support in DOS.

If you screwed up, though, you could instead buy an adaptor so that you could connect the laptop hard drive to your desktop computer; they're fairly cheap.

Yes, this is what I'll probably do. I'll look around for this. Thanks a lot

Brian