Partitioning a drive

[b3six]

I have 2 DiamondMax10s and they are both showing up as 127gb and I checed disk management and I saw that they both have some space that wasnt formatted
I want to use it but I was wondering if I do this I have to create a new partition and will that divide the drive because I already have 2 drives and I dont want 4. would there be a way to divide the 2 drives or am I stuck with the 4 HDs?

 

[Codegen]

What are the sizes of the HDs?

 

[corkyg]

You can use Partition Magic and add the free space to one or both of your exisiting drives and stay with 2 virtuals.

 

[TheGuru3k]

Sometimes when you format the drive, you can't actually entirely use up all the space on the drives due to file system limitations or size issues. In some cases it will generally leave some space unformatted (2 of my drives have ~20MB unallocated that i can't use).

Using something like partition magic is definitely a good way of trying to use the rest of the space, and it has the advantage that it can resize the partitions without requiring a format. So using a program like that will not require you to format, and will be able to simply allocate the extra space to your existing partitions (if possible).

 

[b3six]

its a 200gb HD and i got the other parts of the HD working but I'm going to format because I don't want to use partition magic since I've heard from a couple friends that lost some data and I just dont want to take a chance with it. Right now I have 2 200GB Hard Drives and each 1 has a 127GB partition and a 63GB Partition and I was wondering how do I get rid of the partitions in the drives? After I format I want to make a 10GB Partition for windows xp so how would I do that with logical disk management?
I was told by a maxtor tech to use logical disk management to format the hard drive that xp is on and I wasn't sure if that was possible since I would be in xp while it is formatting.. is this possible or is there another way that I should format my drives?

 

[Heckler 5th]

you can modify partitions to a liimited extent by going to ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS / COMPUTER MANAGEMENT / DISK MANAGEMENT.

 

[b3six]

can i format the hard drive in safe mode that windows xp is installed to?

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: b3six
can i format the hard drive in safe mode that windows xp is installed to?

Yes, you can do that - but what ever is on that drive will be zapped into oblivion.