Last Sunday, I bought a new HP pavilion dv6 6024TX for my wife. She was quite happy with the new machine. The only flaw is that the whole 750G HDD has only one drive C. (There are 4 partitions but rest of them are for recovery purpose). So I take the responsibility to reorganize the partitions.
I did that before by reinstall the OS. But this time I decided to resize the existing partition without losing exist data and create a new partition on freed space.
I started to try Partition Magic of Symantec since I have used it long time before. Unfortunately, the product has been discontinued by its owner as described in
this post.
I have to find another tool. After searching around on net, I found
GParted. The tool is open source and powerful. It can be downloaded
here.
In order to use GParted, system need to be boot under GParted itself. So a bootable USB is needed. I took the follow steps to setup a bootable USB
USB setup with Windows
-
Download the GParted
Live zip file.
-
If you already have a partition of at least 200 MB in size on your
USB flash drive formatted with a FAT file system then skip to the
next step (3).
Otherwise create at least a 200 MB partition on your USB flash
drive and format it with a FAT16 or FAT32 file system.
-
Extract all the contents of the zip file to FAT16/FAT32
partition on your USB flash drive. Keep the directory
architecture, for example, file "COPYING" should be in the USB
flash drive's top directory (e.g. G:\COPYING).
-
Browse to your USB flash drive and as an administrator, click the
makeboot.bat in the dir utils\win32\. WARNING!
Makeboot.bat must be run from your USB flash drive.
-
Follow the on-screen instructions.
(PS: The above description is modified from:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/02/all-in-one-usb-dsl.
Thanks to PDLA from http://pendrivelinux.com)
There are also other ways to create bootable USB. Check out
this link to find more
After setup the USB, reboot system from USB. In order to boot from USB, I need to enter BIOS(press F10 to enter BIOS for HP laptop) and change boot order.
The system will start Debian Linux and eventually enter GParted. It is a X window program looks like this.
Then I can do tasks like resize a partition, create a new partition etc. The whole information about how to use can be found in
Help Manual,
It's not end yet. As I tried to create a new partition on freed space I get this error:
You can not have more than 4 primary partitions
This is because there are already 4 there, one is driver C and the other 3 are HP_TOOLS, RECOVERY and SYSTEM. Windows has the limitation that a machine cannot have more than four primary partitions.
So I have to delete one of them. I backup up the Recovery through HP tool Recovery Manager to 4 DVD. It was pretty straightforward and the instructions can be found
here on HP support site.
After all this, I created a new partition and named it D drive.