Mageia forum

Beginning the installation of Mageia on my zenbook UX32VD I face a beginner issue: disk partitioning.
I do that rarely, partitioning the disk. In fact last time I did it was more than 2 years ago when I installed mandriva free 2010. On my zenbook UX32VD there is 24GB of SSD (contains nothing apparently) and a 500GD HDD.
But the HDD is full of window (yeak).
It is made in the following way and in that order on the disk (seen from Mageia):
/media/win_: 200MB
/sda2: 128MB
/media/win_c: 186GB
/media/win_d: 254GB
/media/win_e: 25GB (recovery)

Can I whip out the recovery? I think so.
The data, yes, no problem, I think I can resize it to the minimum, even delete it.
win_c is way to big. Or does windows 7 take that much storage place??
But resizing this will damage the installed window, won't it? How to make sure of the size to which I can resize this win_c while making sure windrose still works (I still need it once every other month)?

hi

you can indeed delete recovery partition but remember windows is will look for it when you next time you go back into windows and do an update.
from memory the safest way [ if there is one for MS ] is
1/ boot to windows
2/ transfer any useful / personal data off the drive
3/ run defragmenter and scandisk utilities. this will clump all files together on the drive and relatively in the right place to each other. then check disk used capacity
4/ resize windows partititon using windows administrative - disk management tool [ in control panel ] to make the drive about 5-10% larger than the used capacity which will allow windows swap file [ I dont know how much ram you have ] to operate when you need to get into windows again. if you do this from outside the operating system it is possible to cause operating system files to become outside the partition and therefore lost.


kind regards

Thank you benmc, doing it from window may indeed be the safest. How much swap versus RAM should I consider?

What is wrong with windrose? I uninstall some useless bloatware (most of windrose is useless, only money make it useful anyway) and the available space shrinks!

Drive C before doing anything: 35GB
Drive C after removing few programs: 36.1GB
Drive C after defragmentation: 36.1GB (my laptop is new so little to defragment)

And if I want to shrink the C drive, from windwose, as benmc suggested, I can not shrink anywhere near the total available space:

used space on C: 38GB (over 180GB)
free space on C: 142GB
shrinkable space: 92GB

What are the 142-92 = 50GB I should be able to shrink used for??
This is a linux forum, I know and I wished windows was totally useless so I wouldn't need to care to preserve it...

Hi,
Which Windows do you have ?
All files can't be moved, a fortiori when Windows is running (swap files for instance) and you have free space between used areas. I think it is worth to have a try with Gparted.

I used EaseUS Partition Manager on my friends laptop and for myself. Works like a charm. It is for Windows & FREE.

Home Edition
Only For Home Users.
9.1.1 Free Version
http://www.partition-tool.com/landing/home-download.htm

I think you'll find it painless.

I'll second that. Use an external partition tool to resize the windows partition. Windows places some system files in the middle of the partition it is installed on. Actially I just had the same with a 500GB harddrive where I was only allowed to schrink it to 240GB!
In my case I used acronis disk director (livecd) to schrink it. And it works like a charm
(but it's not available for free)

Lebarhon wrote:Which Windows do you have ?

Win7 home premium.
From the other replies, using gparted is risky, could damage some windows files...

madeye wrote:Windows places some system files in the middle of the partition

Maybe a way to prevent other systems to coexist! Windows is like gas, it occupies all the space it is offered

yankee495 wrote:I used EaseUS Partition Manager

Thanks for the idea yankee495.

Well, the Mageia installer allows to shrink NTFS partitions, where's the problem using that? Although you might want to do a chkdsk and defragmentation run from within windows before you attempt that ...

doktor5000 wrote:Although you might want to do a chkdsk and defragmentation run from within windows before you attempt that ...

And backup also just in case. Lost files is not a matter of if but when. So backup is recommended anyway.

I use Gparted a lot and I have very positive experience. And I never had any experience of damaged Windows files. But I had some HDDs which showed that they are not reliable anymore.

ludotw wrote:

madeye wrote:Windows places some system files in the middle of the partition

Maybe a way to prevent other systems to coexist! Windows is like gas, it occupies all the space it is offered

Actually I think the files are placed in the middle of the disc to make the access time more uniform. The thought is that the distance from the farthest sector to the middle will be the same from both outer bounds and inner bounds.