Hard drive

[Potatoman]

Hi all. I have a 120Gb hard disk with WinXP installed. Can i split it with another partition without reinstalling windows or additional software...? (ie 2x 60Gb) And, during set up for XP, would it recognise the disk as 2 seperate ones? Thanks all.

[finex]

It cannot be done without additional software or reinstalling Windows.

It can be done with programs such as Partition Magic.

So, you have two options:

1) Back up everything you want to keep, then reinstall windows and define the partition sizes when you reinstall.

2) Purchase a copy of Partition Magic or equivalent and do it that way. You should still back up anything you can't afford to lose anyway!

To answer your other point, yes, once you have set up a new partition, Windows will view each partition as a separate drive.

[j2buttonsw]

I think you have to be careful about terminology. I don't think XP will recognise it as two seperate disks (the disk manager will show only 1 disk) but as two partitions (be they formatted partitions (or drives) or unformatted free space). If you do a fresh XP install you can delete the current partition then create a partition in the free space to put the installation on (say a 60 GB partition). If you leave the rest as free space, you can use XP disk manager to create another partition using the free space. I don't know whether XP home supports dynamic disks but if you upgrade the disk to a dymanic one, you can have unlimited numbers of volumes on it (the basic disk can have only 4 partitions on it).