Repartitioning existing drive? Gparted?

[itakey]

I have a 4TB drive that is about 1/2 full. Is Gparted still a well functioning free solution? I used to use Partition Magic way back, but I'd rather not spend money on a program since I don't do much repartitioning on a regular basis.

My hope is to resize the drive and repartition without moving the data off, and leave where it is currently. I recall Partition Magic used to do this well, and I think I had used GParted a few times too.

I want to repartition it so I can break it into either 2-2GB partition,s or 1-2GB, and then 2-1GB partitions.

**Shrink Disk**
I'm currently using just under 2TB, so would an easier solution be to "Shrink" my drive with the Windows 7 build in drive manager, and then create 2 new partitions? Does that let you do it without losing data or requiring moving it off? I thought so, but I haven't used this in a long time.

**Gparted or Other Software**
Is GParted still a well functioning solution, or is that old school and not able to handle newer formatting types? Anything else exist that is reliable?

I just looked and I don't know if Partition Magic exists anymore, but I see this is very popular IF I need to go the paid route:
http://www.********************/professional.htm

I'm hoping Gparted can pull it off, can it?
http://gparted.org/

 

[Essence_of_War]

Gparted is still actively maintained and functional for growing/shrinking both partitions and filesystems for NTFS, the FATs, the EXTs and others.

 

[itakey]

Gparted is still actively maintained and functional for growing/shrinking both partitions and filesystems for NTFS, the FATs, the EXTs and others.

Awesome, so that's a safe one to use? I noted that Gparted makes a note to say that it can resize your C drive. Can it resize secondary drives as well still?

I edited my post a bit to add in notes on shrinking in windows disk manager. Is shrinking a good quick option that will accomplish the same without needing Gparted?

 

[Elixer]

Awesome, so that's a safe one to use? I noted that Gparted makes a note to say that it can resize your C drive. Can it resize secondary drives as well still?

I edited my post a bit to add in notes on shrinking in windows disk manager. Is shrinking a good quick option that will accomplish the same without needing Gparted?

Maybe, inside windows, it won't let you shrink past a point.
With GPARTED, you basically have full control.

 

[razel]

The 'shrink disk' in Windows is like a girl and when's she's moody the result you end up with is well named. Sometimes you'll get lucky and it'll shrink right down to the minimum. It appears to matter based on where the file tables are located and *if* Windows can move it. Most of the time it's usually around half, which is often right where NTFS places backups of the file table. It also doesn't give you an ETA. The closest you can get is when it is running, call up it's friend 'Disk Defragment' and you'll see it working away and give you an ETA.... such like a girl.

If you don't want to spend money, many basic partition utilities are free. MiniTool partition manager is free. I tend to prefer Paragon myself, but they only offer it free during certain times. Keep an eye out at giveawayoftheday.com. Of course, if you need one right now, MiniTool or GParted off ultimatebootcd is very safe. When I lasted used it it always checks the file structure. I had to enable that using the other tools.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Awesome, so that's a safe one to use? I noted that Gparted makes a note to say that it can resize your C drive. Can it resize secondary drives as well still?

Yes. Gparted is a GUI around the libparted C library, and if you're booting into the live environment, it doesn't really care about how windows will map the underlying drive letters. As long as the partition has a healthy NTFS filesystem, it should be able to shrink, grow, or copy it safely.

I edited my post a bit to add in notes on shrinking in windows disk manager. Is shrinking a good quick option that will accomplish the same without needing Gparted?

You should be able to do this in the windows disk manager also. I don't normally use the windows disk manager because I typically use gparted to partition disks once, then install OSs and usually don't think about it again.

I think I grew an NTFS filesystem after cloning my secondary storage drive to a larger disk. I ran into a minor problem where it would see the additional volume space, but wouldn't grow the filesystem w/o running 'diskpart' from the cmdline, that's probably just me being ignorant and not seeing how to do it from the disk manager GUI.