Partitioning A Hard Drive with XP already Installed .

[fatherflap]

When I had my old Locally built PC with an 80GB hard drive and XP already installed, I was able to Partition the Hard drive into 4 sections and added Linspire Linux .
I used Acronis Partiton Express to do this and had no problems .When booting I had a screen come up which gave me a choice of XP or Linux.

When I got my new Novatech Isys Pro 945 with XP preloaded . I tried to do the same. Divide the the 250GB hard drive into 4 .
Imagine my shock when I rebooted and found I had wiped the Hard drive clean , no XP and no Partitiones .

Now I wonder whether its a case of the way Novatech installs XP .Or what did I do wrong ? considering it all went smoothly on the other PC.

Can anyone enlighten me as to whether it is possible on a Novatech PC
or will I have to forget it ??.
I am loath to try again due to the time it takes to put everthing back when you have to re-install .

[JDowdall]

hmm partitioning with stuff on the hard drive can be a bit risky to say the least

[fatherflap]

Acronis state that you are able to do it without loss of installed items , and I have used it twice before with no problem . It maybe "third time Unlucky" I suppose.

[djgandy]

I've always used partition magic without any problems.

[Nox]

Sounds like you did something wrong, maybe deleting and recreating rather than resizing and adding 3 ? Being able to resize partitions 'on the fly' is not a feature of XP though, unfortunately, so you will always be reliant on 3rd party software :(

Nox

[fatherflap]

Today I plucked my courage and went ahead and had another go at partitioning the drive with 12GB of files on it . No problem at all used the wizard and alls well.

Yes I know I have been dithering for 5 weeks or so :P