Repartitioning a laptop’s hard drive
 

I’m going to buy a laptop pretty soon (it's an asus gaming laptop), and I have a question about partitioning the hard drive. Based on reviews on the laptop I want to buy, it seems like the hard drive (which is 320 GB), comes partitioned in half, so there are 2 different drives that are about 160 GB each. The OS is Windows 7 (64 bit) and the computer comes with a lot of bloatware installed. I want there to be a small OS partition (20-30 GB, or whatever you’d recommend for Windows 7), and a data partition.

Is it possible to rearrange the partitions so that there will be a 20-30 GB OS partition and a ~300 GB data partition? I know that when there are things already installed on the computer, it complicates partitioning (as opposed to partitioning immediately after installing the OS), so will it be safe to do this considering that there is a lot of bloatware on the computer? Some of the bloatware is essential (it gives you certain functions), so I’d rather not reformat.

But if the only way to do it is reformatting, how do I go about doing this if I don’t have a recovery disk or OS disk? In other words, how would I go about making a recovery disk? If I do reformat, would it install the OS like it was before (with all the bloatware), or would it just be a fresh installation of Windows 7? Which program would you recommend (if you’d recommend partition magic, then which version? I believe I have 8.0)?

Thanks.

Windows Vista and above can repartition live hard disks with just Disk Management (Start > run > diskmgmt.msc).

You just have to make sure there's a large contiguous block of free space. So installing a good defragmenter (Diskeeper, Perfectdisk) and defragmenting to maximize free space helps a lot.

See http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

I'm not too sure about the specifics of this, but I heard that if you do it in Windows 7 through disk management, you have to convert the disk into a dynamic disk, and that's supposed to be bad? Any thoughts on this?

If the Windows Disk Management requires converting the disk, then look into a 3rd party partition resizing tool such as Partition Magic (not free) or GParted (Linux tool, on most linux live cds, including one of its own).

I did this to my laptop when running Windows 7 Home Premium. The volume is still Basic.