Resizing NTFS Partitions

Shovel

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Right, it's been ages since I've had to do anything like this on Windows, so I need a little help on what the current best practice is.

I've got a single hard disc, with two partitions. The first contains Windows (Vista), the second is for installed applications. The Windows partition needs to be made bigger (it was originally set up for XP a long time ago, turns out 20GB isn't enough…*who'd've thunk it…).

Now, if this were a Mac I'd clone both partitions to an external Firewire disc with SuperDuper!, reboot and then boot from the clone, and then operate on my internal drive and then restore the data back again (also with Super Duper). A doddle.

In my (outdated) experience, Windows doesn't like to be cloned. Let alone bootably. We don't have Firewire on the PC, anyway.

Are there now partitioning tools that will resize partitions without destroying any data? Bearing in mind I need to resize the Windows partition into an area of the disc that currently contains the data of the second partition (not into free space).

There's a small budget for software (for comparison, the aforementioned SuperDuper! on the Mac was $20…), and I'll be buying an external hard disc as part of this, so there's some swap space for backing everything up and moving around. It's the fact that we're operating on the Operating System partition that makes me wonder.

How would you do it?
 

TdC

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Doze hates you Ben </booze>
 

inactionman

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Acronis True Image should be able to do what you want, together with a large enough USB2 Hard-drive. USB will do in a pinch if you don't have USB2 support, however it will take ages.
 

Kryten

Old Cow.
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Or failing that use a linux liveCD of choice, most of those partition editors will resize a partition without fucking owt up. I can't remember which, but I always used to use gparted/qtparted to do just that.
 

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