PhilibusMo Posted August 22, 2009 I have recently needed to reinstall windows on my laptop which had an 80gb harddrive split into two equal partitions. When I reinstalled windows it created a sepearte partition of 4.7GB and made that my C drive, which is practically useless as I can't even fit all the windows updates into that. I have tried many things to fix the problem and a few searches of the internet haven't helped, removing partions and reformatting the space, adding new partitions, etc but can't stop it from making a new partition of 4.7GB every time I reinstall. Idealy I would like to not have to spend any money on fixing this problem, but if there is no other way then I guess I will have to. Also I realise this probably isn't the most appropriet forum to post this on but this is the only forum i am a member of and I'm not going to sign up to another to post one question. 0 Share this post Link to post
Nomad Posted August 22, 2009 I've never not had the option of setting the partitions myself during installing Windows. Are you using a full copy of the OS, or is it some stupid recovery disc that the laptop manufacturer gave you? 0 Share this post Link to post
PhilibusMo Posted August 22, 2009 A recovery disk as I am poor and cannot afford a proper copy of XP. 0 Share this post Link to post
HackNeyed Posted August 22, 2009 If you have the space to download and can write and boot a CD/USB stick then GParted should work for you. It's a no install, bootable 'Live Linux'. Just last year I tried nearly every free disk partitioning software I could find and easily figure out. GP was tops even compared to some paid software. I was never very happy with Norton PartitionMagic 8.0. Since I use Acronis TrueImage for backups in XP I got Acronis Disk Director so I could do partitioning work in XP as well and I think it is about as good as GParted. 0 Share this post Link to post
Bucket Posted August 22, 2009 Unfortunately, there is probably no way to re-jigger the recovery disk to install the way you want it to. This is the manufacturer's fault. You could probably download an un-cracked copy of XP and use the OEM key that came with your laptop. Be sure it's the same version or the key won't work. 0 Share this post Link to post
Maes Posted August 22, 2009 The following method may depend on how the recovery disk is actually implemented, but if it contains a copy of the original windows installation files (and not just a nasty custom image-based install), you could probably use a tool like nLite to create a "real" XP installation disk without all the crap. If the files are there, then you can config nLite to "pull them out" and build a new bootable image, which you then burn into a CD-ROM. Make sure you configure it to override any existing installation scripts (if that's the way the preset partitioning etc. works). 0 Share this post Link to post