Hard Drive transfer/management

[rest have risen above me]

I have just fitted a 500Gb hard drive to my desktop as the 30 Gb one was full. Now being a cheapskate I went OEM that came in a box with bugger all else. I did a bit of digging and found Acronis did a transfer program unfortunately I now have a 30Gb full partition and a pretty empty 440Gb partition and I can't find any easy way just to join the two. Any Ideas. 40 notes for a one use program seems a little steep when I looked at disk management programs.

I'm using XP Media centre for the OS

 

[CodeMonkey]

I have just fitted a 500Gb hard drive to my desktop as the 30 Gb one was full. Now being a cheapskate I went OEM that came in a box with bugger all else. I did a bit of digging and found Acronis did a transfer program unfortunately I now have a 30Gb full partition and a pretty empty 440Gb partition and I can't find any easy way just to join the two. Any Ideas. 40 notes for a one use program seems a little steep when I looked at disk management programs.

I'm using XP Media centre for the OS

There are some free tools i could recommend if you are an more tech savvy user. They are free and will not require to complicated steps to use

 

[rest have risen above me]

There are some free tools i could recommend if you are an more tech savvy user. They are free and will not require to complicated steps to use

I'm not a complete biff but I'm not a major geek either...lol
I'll give anything a go as everyday is a learning day... (and I've already created a ghost image of the original drive...lol)

 

[CodeMonkey]

I'm not a complete biff but I'm not a major geek either...lol
I'll give anything a go as everyday is a learning day... (and I've already created a ghost image of the original drive...lol)

So in that case why don't you use ghost to move all data onto the new partition, make that your new primary hard drive.

Plus i'd recommend partitioning the 500Gb drive into say 4 smaller partitions.

 

[rest have risen above me]

The program I'm using seems to want to still create a 30Gb partition for the ghost image. Can I just format the 500Gb into a 200 and 3x100 and copy the ghost onto the 200 Gb I was under the impression that a ghost image goes direct onto an unformatted drive.

 

[CodeMonkey]

The program I'm using seems to want to still create a 30Gb partition for the ghost image. Can I just format the 500Gb into a 200 and 3x100 and copy the ghost onto the 200 Gb I was under the impression that a ghost image goes direct onto an unformatted drive.

Which version of ghost are you using? It's worth looking at the manual for it and decide the best course of action from there.

As for formatting the drive that shouldn't be a problem.

 

[The Masked Geek]

GO and get yourself Partition Magic and stretch the 30G partition to whatever size you want. Easy as pie.